Backstory: Stefania Heim

The women’s legs look better every year.
His basement, still strung with noosed

ham thighs. There is a cemetery
of stacked boxes and he has loved

it for its photographs. Above his arched
valley, there is the stench of burning

fields. Who built these kennels? And who
is this lovely one insisting: Water runs now.

We have husbands. We don’t need you. As though
he could wake and believe that his country was real.

This poem begins with a lie. In fact, my grandfather always expressed the most admiration for American legs, not Italian ones. It wasn’t his choice to immigrate: my grandmother – a proud striver from the comparative social elevation of an artisan family – had gone north on her own (a woman! in Southern Italy!) to take an exam for skilled laborers, earning her small family (herself, my grandfather, my mother (age 11), and her brother (3)) visas through the precision and beauty of her needlework. And though there was – is – so much that thrilled my grandfather about his adopted country (his suitcase on return visits crammed with M&M’s, cartons of Marlboros, and pairs of Levi’s he would distribute with almost manic generosity) his 20th-century optimism has always been shrouded in a real sense of loss. Their small, rural, poor, and stunningly beautiful hilltop town, Roccasicura, became for all of them – even for my siblings and me so many years later – the physical manifestation of other potential lives and imagined ways of being; the readymade stage set for regret and hope and conviction and doubt and meaning.

Here, I give the feelings to my grandfather. The impossibility of believing that his country, his town, (his life, his memories, his friends, his romances) exist, is the combination of menace and beauty, the collision of reality and fantasy that constitute the immigrant's longing.

This poem, the title poem from my recent collection, is one of my most direct attempts to probe this combination of intimacy and estrangement that haunts and propels all of my writing. The sense is of being between places, between languages, between selves. It is about the way everything can sometimes go so quickly and quietly unfamiliar. Here, I give the feelings to my grandfather. The impossibility of believing that his country, his town, (his life, his memories, his friends, his romances) exist, is the combination of menace and beauty, the collision of reality and fantasy that constitute the immigrant’s longing. That constitute longing itself.

—Stefania Heim

Stefania Heim is the author of A Table That Goes On for Miles (Switchback Books, 2014). Her poems, essays, and translations have recently appeared in publications including A Public Space, comma poetry, Ghost Proposal, The Journal of Narrative Theory, and The Literary Review. She is a Poetry Editor at Boston Review and currently teaches at Duke University and Meredith College.

Cover image, A Table That Goes On For Miles (2013), Rachel Farbiarz. Copyright and courtesy the artist. Book design by Elle Collins.

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