Sarah Wetzel: “Ghosts of Sophia Loren”
GHOSTS OF SOPHIA LOREN
Half-awake yet still sleeping, I’m haunted
by thoughts of my mother
to whom I had never paid much attention
when she was alive. It’s as if
I’m seeing her for the first time:
the month she lay in bed, her body
swollen with rheumatoid arthritis or lupus
or scleroderma or something
the doctors weren’t sure of, the finger
she would press into her own flesh,
its indention remaining long
minutes afterward; how she’d take
a tiny loud first sip from every beverage
as if testing its vintage, the floppy straw hats
she favored, the strappy sandals
she purchased and then would take back
feeling guilty for wanting something
so delicate; how when she walked
her hips swayed like Sophia Loren’s,
my father once said; and how she’d spend
an hour or more browsing
the book section at Walmart, reading
the last few pages of the paperback
romances she might buy, as if
every ending weren’t the same, but some,
she’d explain,
are happier than others.
Sarah Wetzel is the author of River Electric with Light, which won the AROHO Poetry Publication Prize and was published by Red Hen Press in 2015, and Bathsheba Transatlantic, which won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry and was published in 2010. Sarah is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York and, whenever possible, teaches creative writing at The American University of Rome.