Peter Covino
POVERTY
OF LANGUAGE | MIDNIGHT ON THE FIFTH
DAY OF A NEW YEAR | AT THE TRIPLE
TREAT THEATRE | HIS TOUCH
| SECOND COUNTRY | RICE
SIX
POEMS from CUT OFF THE EARS OF WINTER FIRST
RUNNER UP: THE BORDIGHERA POETRY PRIZE 2000
 Peter
Covino's poems have most recently appeared or are forthcoming
in The Journal, The Paris Review, The Ohio Review, Verse, Evergreen
Chronicles, Art and Understanding, VIA: Voices in Italian Americana
and on line at Cortland Review.com., among other journals.
Peter was born in Italy and educated there, and in the States
where he earned a Master's degree in Social Work from Columbia
University. He received an MA in Poetry from The City College
of New York in June 2001 NS Ph.D. in the subject from the U. of
Utah, 2006. He is currently teaching at The State U. of Rhode
Island. Covino is also an editor of the poetry journal, Barrow
Street. He is pictured here reading at the November, 2000,
Awards Ceremony at Poets House, as the first runner-up in the
2000 Bordighera Poetry Book Prize.
Distinguished
Poet Judge W.S.DiPiero said this about Covino's manuscript, Cut
Off the Ears of Winter: "These poems are acts of discovery.
They deal with tough, seamy, risky-what academics now call 'transgressive'-subject
matter. There's a strangely exhilarating desperation in
most of these poems that's compelling.This poet uses words as
a medium,as materials, not as descriptive or narrative vehicles.I
also like the angular, unsettling humor threaded into nearly every
poem." The
following are six sample poems from Covino's prize-winning manuscipt,
now published in 2005 by New Issues Poetry: Western Michigan U.
English Dept. 1903 W.Michigan Ave. Kalamazoo, MI.
49008.
POVERTY
OF LANGUAGE
If
a mother were to say: "I pray
to
the Virgin you die of AIDS."
You
see I'm doing it again,
shutting
you out.
"I
should have eaten you at birth."
This
language is wealth,
a
red dress,
an
injection.
*
* *
Father
spoke to us
in
erudite Italian:
pederasta-pederast,
infangare-to
muddy,
to
soil
as
in ruining one's name.
Mother
spoke
in
a strange combination
of
denial
and
Southern Italian dialects:
femminiello,
she'd
call me
femminiello,
she'd
call my sister
femminiello,
my
father
femminiello--one-half
little girl,
one-half
little faggot.
©
2000 by Peter Covino, with acknowledgment to VIA: Voices in Italian
Americana, (Vol. 8, No.1, Spring 1997)
MIDNIGHT
ON THE FIFTH DAY
OF
A NEW YEAR
Everyone
is slightly orange-tinted
or
red-pink drear in those B-movies
from
the 70's I can't cut off
at
midnight on Channel 55.
Five
days into the new year-
and
I'm wondering how much longer
it
will be last year in my checkbook,
memos
from work-the correspondence
is
piled higher on the lower left shelf.
Sweetie's
swatting at a batch
destined
for extinction,
rustling
at my feet, his paw catches
my
hand when I swish him away--
swish,
the skin not breaking.
Michael
Caine is the latest personality
disorder
in this granular film
I've
almost watched a half dozen times,
his
hand keeps coming off every time
he's
betrayed or angry, his hand
killing,
mostly women who won't
love
him back . . . and I'm feeling sorry
for
the dying women, the hand he stabs
in
one sequence, knife protruding.
Next,
a bloodstained trail leads
to
a deflated tire in a barn,
filmed
from above, through hay,
wood
beams. Now the expected turn:
this
morbid fascination with dismemberment,
or
why I can't cut off movies
about
being buried alive;
in
the muffled darkness,
a
straw to breathe through
on
a cold night in a new year.
©
2000 by Peter Covino with acknowledgement to The Journal
, Vol. 22.2, Autumn 1998.
AT
THE TRIPLE TREAT THEATRE
I
used to pretend I stumbled into the place
casually,
after a long day shopping or
I'd
pretend I was a drunk
trying
not to act drunk.
I'd
catch my breath
and
press against the door, waiting
for
myself to stop teetering
then
I'd browse through the porno magazines,
in
quick impulsive start and stop motions
as
if someone were ready to fight me
for
the only item of its kind
still
on sale.
But
now, I strut into the place,
with
my head up (as if I owned it)
and
I do a B-line straight to the video booths.
All
my worst nightmares have come true:
I
have become that foul-smelling
cubicle
with the red light on.
And
I dream I can hump as well
as
anyone; and I dream
I
can enjoy all that exciting humping.
And
I dream that I hump for twenty-four hours,
(and
it only costs 25 cents, a minute).
I'm
always humping in the bed,
in
the shower, in the jungle,
on
the grass, on the floor.
And
you know, I'm really starting to get tired.
When
I try to change the channel
nothing
comes on the screen clearly.
I
think I'm a porn star and I feel
like
a porn star, believe me.
But
every porno star on this dirty
twelve
inch screen has lines through him,
and
the vertical hold doesn't hold;
instead
of that familiar grunting
and
gasping, I hear static.
Everything
thing is static.
And
the twelve inch video monitor,
in
that dark booth threatens to swallow
me
whole, I am swallowed whole.
©
2000 by Peter Covino with acknowledgement to The Paris Review,
No. 154, Spring 2000.
HIS
TOUCH
Today
I learned the cost of living has not gone up.
I
am not worth a three percent raise.
Today
I learned I can't live a day without
coming
back to you, back to that point.
Not
ten years of therapy, not an ocean
between
us, a generation gap.
Today
I learned the money I earn
will
never be enough:
furniture
polish, wax,
a
spit-shine for all spit-shines.
How
I have recreated those nights,
my
first communion, my marriage;
and
how I enjoy these reenactments,
lover-father,
father-lover,
as
much seducer as seduced,
as
much only child as fatherless son.
And
if I could carve myself
out
of myself,
if
I could bleed
a
thousand baths-
because
even then I'd repair myself
the
way water does after it is entered.
Oh,
the slippery friction of it,
the
slippery fiction,
for
you have loved me too well
and
you have not loved me well enough.
©
by Peter Covino with acknowledgement toThe Journal., Vol.
22.2, Autumn 1998.
SECOND
COUNTRY
By
the time North Africa is annexed-
Ethiopia
and Somalia, in quick succession-
he
has already laid stake
to
her genitalia.
Sometimes
she savors the euphoria
of
his drinking: he powerless, she sleeping
with
the windows open-his crushed Fedora hat,
his
broken crutches, the useless cobbler tools.
Just
yesterday, it seems, over a wide expanse
of
desert, he shot at defenseless men
wrapped
in white cloth, carrying walking sticks
--
toy soldiers.
Once,
in a fit of desperation,
his
wife shaved the side of her head
and
mailed her hair along with a voided check
back
to her brother in Venezuela.
Because
she can no longer keep anything own,
he
barters shoe repairs
and
a silver cigarette case in exchange
for
a ride into the city for medicine.
By
mid-August, bright fireworks
saturate
the skies of all the surrounding valleys
in
spite of the Occupation
and
lack of drinking water.
She
imagines water splashing
into
the fountain of the main piazza.
Her
body-incense dissipating,
her
breath fills the room.
©
2000 by Peter Convino with acknowledgement to: The Ohio Review
, No.61, Sp.--Sm.2000.
RICE
He'd
beat her, whenever he wanted,
because
dinner was late,
because
she cooked him rice again.
He
especially hates rice
it
reminds him of the war,
the
prisoner-of-war camps,
their
paltry meals, near
Bergen-Belsen
where Ingrid
visited
him in his bunk,
slinking
past S.S. guards
promising
favors in lavender
negligees
and embroidered
slippers--just
to sneak him
sugar
so the rice could
almost
taste like sweet ricotta.
Mother,
my mother, sometimes fought
back,
but that usually hurt worse.
She'd
bruise easily and have to lie
to
her Chinese co-workers at the dress shop;
they
ate rice everyday in delicate bone-china
bowls,
rice with Chinese vegetables, water-
chestnuts,
Chinese spinach, snap-peas.
Copyright
© 2000 and 2005 by Peter Covino, from Cut Off the Ears
of Winter, New Issues Poetry,
Western Michigan U. English Dept. 1903 W.Michigan Ave. Kalamazoo,
MI. 49008-5331. Also available
at amazon.com. All rights reserved by the author.
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