BE, 1996

images float in my
mind like peels
in a blocked sink:

at times i catch one,
rinse it, dry it, frame it:

my parents, young,
on a beach with no
sand, holding hands,

overexposed smiles
under a dark sky,

their eyes sparkling with
a love they hoped for.

from the tip of my fingers,
i make circles in the sink
to unblock it: little whirls
that push away what
few images are left.

the water is stale,
colours are faded:
i won’t have enough
memories to last
the year.

RO, 1999

on our way back from faculty, we’d stop by the side of the road to buy a watermelon that my grandmother, then my grandfather when she no longer could, then me once i finally could, would put in the boot of the car, making it sink by a centimetre or two in front of the vendor’s cart, motionless under its near-ton of fruit.

at home, we’d store the watermelons in the bathroom, next to the laundry basket covered in stacks of tv magazines whose last pages were but lists of five-digit phone numbers and miniature photos of women with star-covered nipples.

summers clung to the skin with their never-ending heat: i’d retreat to the larder, sticking my head between jars of marinated peppers, bags of polenta, and a long row of tomatoes, sorted by size in a line as perfect as the one on the thermometer which, on the other side of the balcony, quietly reached forty-two degrees.

when the heat became unbearable, we’d rinse it off our skins in the shower, where we sometimes found a watermelon that had rolled from the other side of the bathroom:

like my memories, the floor was slightly slanted.

This text is part of Lineage II, a poetry anthology edited by Roberto Salvador Cenciarelli and Oscar Mather and published in 2026 by Oblique House.