“Fimmene, Fimmene” is a folk and protest song from the Salento region of Italy that recounts sexual and somatic traumas women experienced working in the tobacco fields. This poem is modeled after Pratt’s poem “Waulking Song.”
fimmine, fimmine ca sciati allu tabaccu
lu sule è forte e bbu lu sicca tuttu
I never wanted to be a woman who endures.
Reduced to a hand / a throat / a mouth.
To seeds spilled across some field, to strands
of hair unraveling mythologies of wheat-full
summer storms, of mothers and daughters
who turn the crops human in their longing.
In summer, my body doubles.
I long to be single again.
fimmine, fimmine ca sciati allu tabaccu
la ditta nu bbu dae li talaretti
I am not a good daughter, but I bring cigarettes
to my grandmother’s grave. Some good tangle
of heat for her memory. She suffered a thousand
miscarriages before my father was born, suffered
a thousand losses at his hand. I try to divine
gratitude from bird song, listening for the crow’s
cackle at my right. The sun is strong.
The dead, they say, are always hungry.
fimmene, fimmene, ca sciati a vindimmiari
sott’a lu cippone ve la faciti fari
The moon tangled in the trees’ strong arms.
Clever girls hide in a sprawl of wood,
crack twigs with hungry feet, She was missing,
missed, and the ocean was quiet as a hearse.
Even the exclamation marks shuttered still.
I wanted to unthread syntax with my teeth,
but I had no mouth to carry my bite.
The last word is always a prayer.
fimmine, fimmine ca sciati alle vulie
ccugghitinde le fitte e le scigghiare
Silver parsed from strangling, our candles covered
the changing sky with tongues of light. Each spring,
we weave a doll from the first green shoots of life.
Each summer, we watch her burn. Last year, the rains
never came. The hills turned to golden shadow,
the strawberries went on strike. We spun the wool
covering our eyes to cloth. Hello, little moth.
Goodbye, little flame.
______
When I think of Minnie Bruce Pratt’s work I think of a radical poetics that interrogates power in all of the ways that it manifests. I think of a particular flavor of brass-bright brilliance that is unrelenting in its attention and care. While I approach the page with a different set of aesthetics, I try to carry those femme ethics with me to the page, to, as Pratt said, “resist . . . degradation” and “assert the power and dignity,” and, I hope, joy, of queerness. —J.R.B.
Memento Mori by Alexa Garvoille
Fimmene, Fimmene by Jessica Rae Bergamino
Bayou La Terre by Stacey Balkun
Become, or whatever marriage is equal to is not nearly enough by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Never the Devil’s Advocate by Margaret Randall
