THIRTEEN AND TAKEN TO ITALY

Like an important item among my parents’
luggage. Ate at linen-clad dinner tables,
pasta with Bolognese, always mineral water.
Bought satin jeans, missed my friends’
eighth grade graduation parties in New York.
But the Tuscan landscape,
craggy hillsides, startled me from
a car window, how they seemed vertical,
stacked heavenward. On a night
watching a fireworks display in an open field,
there was room to wander, to become lost
in some deep green far-off trees
until my mother called my name. The color
of the vendor’s cart was candy apple red,
we ate raspberry and cream gelato, smoother
and richer than ice cream in America. Thirteen
and concerned mostly with collecting every
miniature jar of jam the hotel sent up
with breakfast. Thirteen and thinking of my
swim-suited friends in their hot tubs back home,
lonely but getting used to sitting on a stoop watching
natives go by, legs and clacking heels, pink cascades
of blooms, my family in context, my mother smiling more.