by K.G. Ricci
Family Album
My mother tells me no one in this family
has died of love. Black and white
photographs scattered on the table cloth.
Each image its own puddle
of memory whose depths we explore
with our fingertips, as if the past
could be felt, holding an object
believed to contain it.
This would explain humanity’s obsession
with relics; a splinter of wood from the destruction
of Troy— a portion of sponge
from a medieval bath. No one
is an exception. The other day,
rummaging through drawers,
I found the bus tickets my wife and I used
while in Moscow. Having them
in my hands I remembered how snow
blanketed the city and shoulders of statues
locked in their eternal expressions.
How we walked through a park past leafless trees,
and how, by the river, there was a moment
while taking pictures, seconds
really, of pure presence, of watching
my wife stare off into the distance
and thinking to myself how real
this all was— a pure perception of my life
stripped of the accidental and arbitrary
in order to acknowledge what felt like
everything— the snow beneath
my shoes, the air moving
through my hair, and the sounds
of a day fully being recognized.
A moment that when asked
by my wife what I was thinking, the only
word that felt sufficient enough to say
was nothing.
Andrew Navarro is a poet from Southern California. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Poet Lore, Michigan Quarterly Review, Zyzzyva, Air/Light, and Shenandoah. He received his MFA from the University of California, Riverside, and works as a history teacher.
K.G. Ricci, a self-taught New York City artist, made a collage on a file cabinet in 2015. The creative possibilities of the medium immediately inspired him. Fifty cut and paste panels followed, visual improvisations on 20” x 40” or 2’ X 4’ hardboard. Recently, Ricci sustained his implied narrative focus in Numbered-Not Named, a series of original pieces, 6” x 9” on black stock. His current project, Random Thoughts in the Waiting Room, is a visual flash fiction series of books with a single word or a fragment of text in each collage composition. Ricci has exhibited in 27 galleries including solo shows and many more online galleries. His collages have been published in poetry and literary magazines nationally and internationally online and in print.