Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share and examine their work, produced and moderated by John Gillespie. Episode 16 features Kathryn Petruccelli reading “Whales” and Paola Bruni reading “Limoncini". Whales By Kathryn Petruccelli I have a photo of my mother in a gray hoodie on a boat—a whale watching trip. We see a few tails at a distance. Regardless, for the five-hour duration, she holds her camera to her eye, with the exception of this moment, when I take her picture. In another version, the boat rocks wildly in the wake of all the breaching; squeals from excited tourists create a din. I have to shout to my mother. She turns toward me, my photo a brief interruption to her agenda: she clicks and clicks at the splashing. Let’s say this time the water is glass. Far off on the horizon, what might be a small spray from a blowhole, maybe a second. A pod moving off. My mother is nonetheless enthralled, wind buffeting us. She anchors herself, turns and smiles, and that’s when I snap the picture. What I left out before is that the boat zooms to a likely spot before the captain cuts the motor. Soon, a female humpback sidles up next to us and goes to sleep. The crew calls it “extraordinary” over the PA system. The boat lists to one side while every passenger aboard leans out over open ocean to try to get a photo. Eventually, mom and I give up our spots to let others see. We shake our heads in awe. She poses on the opposite rail, empty of people, and I shoot off a bunch of pictures. The one I like best I frame and station in the living room. After several years and two moves, I forget the details of the trip. At some point, I slide the picture out of its smart black metal and replace it with one of the kids posing in Halloween costumes. The truth is, it’s off season. There are no other tourists on the deck. The few who came are inside eating Doritos; the wind is cold and mom and I alone brave it. Even though right out of the docks we had dolphins following the boat’s wake, now all is quiet minus an occasional cormorant overhead. It isn’t until we’re almost back at the harbor, the crew apologetic, naturalist going on and on about breeding habits, that I think to aim my camera at mom, who smiles obligingly, tells me she doesn’t mind about the whales, it was still a thrill just to be on the water. There is no boat. Mom and I stand on sand and squint in the direction the German man pointed. We can only make out white crests on a choppy sea. Mom pulls her hood on and focuses her lens on hermit crabs in the tidepool. I’ve forgotten my camera in the car. Tomorrow she will fly home across the country and I will see her again once more before the day I arrive at the hospital and kiss her cheek. She’ll leave me a letter that says, It was enough. Limoncini By Paola Bruni The small craters of the sun-tipped Villafranca lemon, bitter to the tongue. Perhaps, my grandmother would say, a propagation like the Sicilians themselves— too much salt in the air. The fruit has a pale oval neck, an inconspicuous nipple. To her, it was a stunted variety, as I feared was I. My breasts, she termed limoncini, a pair of petite sour fruits I’d inherited from my father’s side. For hers were classically Primofiore, a strain of lemon excessive in their fleshy countenance. In my adolescence, she took to pinching my nipples between her thumb and forefinger. I implored my mother to intervene. But on the subject of breasts, she spoke only to say, You didn’t want my milk, my infant lips refusing to suckle. When the surgeons took my mother’s left breast, I was eighteen and filled with remorse. Does rejection grow invasive roots? Grandmother developed an attraction for the ample, thick-rind Genoa and Lisbon species. On special occasions, the Limetta was sought, a sweet incestuous marriage of the Eureka lemon and Mexican lime. She served fricassea di vitella, cotolette di maiale fritte, crostata di limone—dishes so rife with lemony hues, every meal lifted to a bright archipelago. We did not understand the lemon’s complex vocabulary, or how deeply its seeds were sown. By the time I left college, Grandmother stopped referring to my breasts as limoncini. Instead, un pecato, a shame. She worried I would not mate, would not propagate. How often I thought of her through my barren, childless years. Grandmother was long gone when Mother’s right breast was trimmed away. She was left no foliage to soak up the warmth of the world, only pale pink branches that spread across her chest.
KATHRYN PETRUCCELLI is a Pushcart-, Best of the Net-, and Best Small Fictions-nominated poet with roots in spoken word and a degree in teaching English language learners. Her poetry has appeared in places like the Massachusetts Review, Whale Road Review, RHINO, About Place Journal, and Anacapa Review. You can find her prose at places like SweetLit, Switch, Fictive Dream, The Los Angeles Review, and Wrong Turn Lit. Kathryn recently relocated with her family to the west of Ireland which she enjoys greatly, besides missing her former job as tour guide at the Emily Dickinson Museum. She teaches online, pay-what-you-can workshops that aim to build community. Come say hello via her website: poetroar.com, or at her Substack newsletter, Ask the Poet.
PAOLA BRUNI is originally from San Francisco and now lives in Aptos, California by the sea. She began writing poetry in 2016 after a long marketing career. Pushcart nominated, her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Five Points Journal, The Birmingham Review, Rattle, Adroit, SWWIM, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the Morton Marcus Poetry Prize and the Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Contest judged by Ellen Bass. Her first book of poetry titled how do you spell the sound of crickets is an epistolary collection written with the late poet, Jory Post, and published by Paper Angel Press. Paola is also co-author of the nonfiction book, Let God Love You Up, published by the Maria Press. Read more at paolabruniwriter.com.