“Gelati” by Liana Cusmano
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. This June, Poetry Pause celebrates Indigenous and LGBTQI2S+ poets for Indigenous History Month and Pride Month! Read “Gelati” by Liana Cusmano.
Gelati
By Liana Cusmano
our gelati are in a race
melting in the summer sun
at Parco della Piccola Italia
and for years whenever we pass that spot
one of us will mention the couple
we overheard fighting that day
as my pistacchio lost out
to your amarena
we buy a bubble blowing stick from a vendor
near Beaver Lake one afternoon
and every five-year-old
in a one hundred metre radius
becomes our number one fan
we sit by the water and make offerings
to the squirrels
I teach you the word scoiattolo
the way my father used to say it
shouting, in sing-song
our grandparents are interred in
the nearby Notre-Dame-des-Neiges Cemetery
we are not yet ready to wonder
whether our queer bodies
will be buried on this mountain
when we bring out
our very last roll of toilet paper
on a day bursting with storm clouds
I say let’s bike to the pharmacy on Jean-Talon
it’s just water
the cascade nearly flushes us d own the street
our clothes tattooed onto our bodies
by the time we reach the next block
it’s just water
I choke
you plant your feet in a puddle
handlebars lying in the mud
and say
I want to go home
Sometimes
the lamp on our bedside table
flickers beneath its lampshade
and it reminds me of how
you make my bones light up
from the inside.
when I start the elimination diet
you insist that we can make it fun
so we make scones exclusively
out of substitute ingredients
and when they liquefy and then crust
onto the bottom of the baking sheet
we have to throw them out,
the laughter on our tongues
the sweetest thing we’ve tasted
in weeks
that I could hold all these moments
in the palm of my hand
and live them all over again
whenever we are apart
that I could feel your skin on mine
at airports, on train platforms
in the quiet of our home
and express that nothing is more sacred
that all the time in the world
could never be enough
Copyright © Liana Cusmano
Writer, spoken word artist, and arts educator Liana Cusmano (aka Luca/BiCurious George) was the 2018, 2019 and 2023 Montreal Slam Champion and runner-up in the 2019 Canadian Individual Poetry Slam Championship. They wrote the screenplay for the short film “La femme finale”, screened at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, and wrote and directed the award-winning “Matters of Great Unimportance”, screened at the 2019 Blue Metropolis Festival. They are Associate Editor at Accenti Magazine and Fiction Editor at the literary journal carte blanche. Their first novel, Catch & Release (2022), was published by Guernica Editions. They were also a 2022 finalist for the QWF Spoken Word Prize.
Subscribe to Poetry Pause, or support Poetry Pause with a donation today!