Castellammare del Golfo

by Rosie Rockel

Alpine Fellowship 2022 – Poetry Prize Runner Up

Me and the moon have been getting fat out here, as dog-eared days

clatter like coins into a cup. A tarpaulin inhales slowly like a lung

over the fish market. I have gone to buy an octopus. An idiot promise

to myself I want to keep. Boiled with a cork that night to prevent toughness

from loneliness - which can happen - it blushes quick mauve,

arms tendrilling. I eat my octopus in my Airbnb

and then I am alone. That’s when I hear music drifting in drunken squalls

over the water. I look out to see hundreds of stunning teenagers

swarming across the harbour. They’re storming

up and down the promenade, glassy with hunger, sugar high

in the cheeks. The scirocco has them all riled up, snatching shouts

and sighs from their throats and hawking them to the night. Suddenly

I’m storming up and down the promenade with them, caped

in orange streetlight by the black sea, the air on my face

like a new mouth. It’s impossible to imagine a wind so hot

and so strong, maybe like the wake of a New York subway train

in August, but I don’t want you to think of that.

I want you to think of it spitting stinging sand, fingering

laces untied, whistling over eyelids syrup-slick. Can you see us, drawn together

under the pantomime moon, surging around cars, smashing

into lamp-posts. Picture us as one great wave. Make sure

you get in the hot air, sugar and sand. Nights like this

come around like comets sent to rake us from our beds, sickly with desire.

I buy a passito and stand clutching it, run aground

on the sweet sudden comfort that we’re nothing but gorgeous vehicles

for mitochondrial DNA. I’m in it but I can see it all too, see the gears turn.

The wind has laid the mechanics bare. All of us freighted by hollow-

stomached longing towards some ineluctable goal, coupled

to the chains of whatever furtive engine it is that hauls us

into the churning night.

About the author:

Rosie Rockel

Rosie Rockel works in television and writes poems in the notes app of her phone.