I am From…
By Gabrielle Filippini
I am from the intersection of bustling main streets where people talk, children play,
and drivers refuse to use their turn signals.
I am from a home overlooked by towers
topped with giant golden onions
which ring like sonic booms every hour on the hour and at midnight on Easter Sunday.
I am from patchy, itchy crabgrass;
the neighborhood weeds
which spread like contagion every summer.
Who started it?
It wasn’t me!
(It might have been me.)
I am from sometimes hurtful sarcasm
and vocabularies sustained by old movie quotes. “Put. The Candle. Back!”
I am from a long-running game of Jeopardy with my father which began the day I learned to speak
and ended July 11th, 2020.
And just when I was finally winning too.
I am from an ocean’s worth of marinara sauce and enough older cousins to drown in.
I swim upstream through family just to be heard like the fish we serve every Christmas Eve.
I am from two brave people who stepped off a boat 100 years ago,
who we are reminded of every time
someone puts raisins and pine nuts in their meatballs. (Doesn’t make it right, though.)
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