Diana Dinverno

January 2023 | poetry

La Traviata at the Vienna Opera House

Prelude

The exquisite hush, the overture, and the curtains rise, cue Violetta and her soon-to-be lover, Alfredo, and I wonder how my husband has managed to acquire these coveted seats. I study the audience below, the tiered boxes across the way—women wearing couture, a surprise of silk kimonos, men in tuxedos, satin sashes across their chests. Other performances; stories I’ll never know. An immense chandelier still twinkles in the theatre’s semi-darkness and my mind wanders to our day’s trek across the city, from the boutique hotel where a copy of Klimt’s The Kiss hangs on the bedroom wall, to the nearby stone church, fresh snow on cedar roping, wreathes; streets filled with shoppers; the Café Central, its marble-topped tables once occupied by chess players, Trotsky, and Freud, where we indulge in coffee and chocolate cake—all lush backdrops for tragedy.

Act I

The Hofburg’s verdigris dome rises above the winter residence of Emperor Franz Joseph and Empress Elisabeth—Sisi, he called her—and it’s easy to be distracted by soaring ceilings spangled with gilt, parquet floors, the pigeon-blood red dining room where they entertained, rather than the private rooms where Franz Joseph mourned the suicide of their son, Sisi’s brutal end, assassination of his heir, the stilled heart that triggered the First World War, seeded the next, and I glance out the tall windows, see the once flag-draped balcony overlooking Heroes Square, where in ’38, Hitler—who as a youth, shoveled snow so the Emperor and his family could pass, who yearned to follow them into the dazzling ballroom—stood before a crowd, warp and malice disguised in rhetoric, and commanded the good people to forfeit their city, country, to take up hammers, shatter glass to recover what he claimed had been lost.

Act II

We walk to the Museum of Fine Arts with paintings that once shimmered in Shabbos dinner candlelight before being scooped up, along with the candlesticks, by good people now remembered as the führer’s murderers and thieves, yet, I climb the front steps, drawn by Brueghel’s scenes of village life, and a single Vermeer, The Art of Painting, recovered from a salt mine after the war, its ownership disputed as if it were a child in an ugly divorce. I linger, immersed in its luminosity. I have the right to this moment, I tell myself, and try not to think of what was stolen, never to be restored.

Act III

We arrive at Schönbrunn, the summer palace, its gardens and follies now snow covered, where in 1762, six-year-old Mozart, bubbling with joy, performed for Queen Maria Theresa who moved her children across the continent like game pieces, including her fourteen-year-old daughter, Antonia, a budding flute-player, a pawn sacrificed to France, stripped of her name to become Marie Antoinette, forever tagged with a line she never uttered—about cake. Maria Theresa, a mother who never saw what became of her girl. Maria Theresa, an anti-Semite whose strategy was expulsion—unlike the solution favored a hundred and fifty years later by the jackbooted man on that balcony in the splintered heart of Vienna, hand slashing the sky, promising to restore glory, the fate suffered by my cousin, Rochel, smiling from a framed photo, a glimmer of light extinguished at the Stutthof concentration camp when she was nineteen, her winsome brother, shot dead crossing a border, and over thirty other family members caught in the rain of glass. Stories I’ll never know.

Finale

I reach for my husband’s hand. We keep attending these performances beneath prisms dangling above the stage, its streets. Violetta and Alfredo join Verdi’s chorus: Let’s drink from the joyful cups! I savor each bright note because I know what’s ahead. When the curtains fall, the audience will rise from velvet seats and applaud.

Diana Dinverno

Diana Dinverno’s work has appeared in The Gyroscope Review, The Westchester Review, Panoply Magazine, The MacGuffin, and other publications. She is the recipient of the Michigan Poetry Society’s 2019 Margo LaGatutta Memorial Award, the Barbara Sykes Memorial Humor Poem Prize, and the 2022 Chancellor’s Prize. Her work received a nomination for Sundress Publication’s Best of the Net in 2020, and a Pushcart nomination in 2021. Dinverno writes and practices law in Michigan.

Evan Anders

January 2023 | poetry

The Mother/Strawberries

January 2023 | poetry

That hot afternoon you took us to pick strawberries at a truck farm just off Dixie Highway, counting out change for three baskets to fill. The farmer took it and grinned at us in a way that seemed mean to me, but we wanted the berries, and you had used all your money so we could have them. “Ya’ll want some bubble gum?” The farmer pulled a few pieces of Dubble Bubble from his pocket. “I give it to them pickaninnies who work for me. Keeps ‘em from eating my fruit.” I saw that you were looking at him with some kind of revulsion – it crossed your face quickly, but he saw it, too – and then you said, “Thank the man for the offer, girls, even if you don’t want it,” which meant we weren’t to take it, and he looked you up and down, showing you he could look at you like that because you were a woman and what could you do about it, and then he smirked and said, “It’s stoop work. Gotta bend over to get at ‘em,” and you turned away from him and led us out into the field, but you didn’t pick the berries, and I realized that you weren’t going to let him see you bending over, and I saw there was something dark about bending over, and it made me uneasy so that I kept looking back at where he stood watching us, watching you. And I understood that if you bent down to pick a single strawberry, you would lose some battle still unknown to me, and it shamed me. We quickly filled our baskets, and after supper, the berries shined like stained glass on our plates. Now, so many years later, I sometimes think of him, the first man I ever saw leer at a woman, the first time I saw it for what it was. But it wasn’t the first time a man leered at you, was it, and were you thinking of your girls that day, of us growing up, and what that would mean, and were you thinking, Never bend over. Never bend, even though you bent, you bent every day until, at last, you couldn’t bend anymore.

Nancy Connors

Nancy Connors is a poet and writer whose work has appeared in Stonecoast Review, failbetter, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, The Phare, Midwest Review and others. She is the recipient of a 2023 Pushcart Prize for her poem, “To Cigarettes.” She lives in New York’s Lower Hudson Valley.