Adria Bernardi

We would draw rooms of houses

with chalk on the sidewalk,

furniture, doors and windows,

and when we wanted to expand,

we drew them on the street

where we had to move over

whenever a car approached

from up or down the street;

the chalk that worked best

for this purpose was not the

chalk for chalkboards (side-

walk chalk was not invented

and if it was we didn’t

know about it) but the chalk

that was to be had in pieces

broken off from the walls

of the houses being newly

constructed, the remnant

pieces literally there for

the taking scattered on the lots

or just outside the foundation

in the heaps of the discarded

building materials. The dis-

advantage of this chalk was

that it came in one color:

white; the advantage – it

lasted, and it could write

over both cement and

asphalt without snapping

apart, crumbling in the

hand, leaving the knuck-

les, suddenly and unex-

pectedly scraping against

the pavement. In this way,

two little girls for several

years imagined houses,

rooms; what was never re-

solved, as far as I was con-

cerned, was, that while

the doors and windows

could be imagined and

walked through, and even

the stationary aspect of

the furniture (once drawn,

a chair had to stay in

its corner, a vase with

flowers, a table, the path

to the door, the chimney)

could be accommodated

in the imagining, there

was never a truly

satisfactory way of walking

from one level to another.

Adria Bernardi was a 2014 Open Submissions reader for Kore Press.

 

Adria Bernardi is the author of the IPPY-Award-winning essay collection, Dead Meander (Kore Press). Dead Meander, born out of fragments of breakages made by leavings off, investigates how things can be made whole, or more whole, in the time following such leavings, transitions and traumas. Bernardi also has two novels, Openwork and The Day Laid on the Altar, the latter which was awarded the 1999 Bakeless Prize by Andrea Barrett, and a collection of short stories, In the Gathering Woods, which was awarded the 2000 Drue Heinz Literature Prize by the late Frank Conroy. Her translation of the work of the Italian poet Raffaello Baldini, Small Talk, was published in 2009. She was awarded the 2007 Raiziss/de Palchi Fellowship by the American Academy of Poets to complete this work. Her translation of the poetry of Cristina Annino, Chronic Hearing: Selected Poems 1977-2012, and the poetry of Francesca Pellegrino, Chernobylove –The Day After the Wind: Selected Poems 2008-2010, were recently published by Chelsea Editions in 2014. She is the author of an oral history, Houses with Names: The Italian Immigrants of Highwood, Illinois. Bernardi has taught fiction writing at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.      

Adria Bernardi   adriabernardi.com

Chronic Hearing http://adriabernardi.com/books/chronic-hearing.php

Chelsea Editions  http://www.chelseaeditionsbooks.org Cristina Annino http://www.anninocristina.it/