Art: Gianluigi di Napoli, @gianluigidinapoli
SILVER-SCREEN ROMANCE
A woman with one large eye and one small eye
brushed against a man with a limp he managed to disguise
in a sinuous lineup to a controversial foreign film
of a director touted as the new Federico Fellini
(or was it the new François Truffaut?)
the man thought—
he was on his fourth beer of the afternoon
when he read the review in a big-city newspaper
while sitting in a small-town café
waiting for the world to end yet again.
They both said “I’m sorry” at the same time
and she smiled
and he attempted to smile
one of them, I can assure you,
was already thinking
of a silver-screen romance—
she thought he looked slightly like Marcello Mastroianni
in La Dolce Vita
he almost said she resembled Nathalie Baye
in Day for Night.
When they mentioned the foreign film
she said Fellini
he said Truffaut
but neither one of them
could recall the film director’s name
as they pretended to be
both erudite and sophisticated
with their contrived accents
and lost cinematic lives.
About the author:
Fiction writer, poet, and playwright J. J. Steinfeld lives on Prince Edward Island, where he is patiently waiting for Godot’s arrival and a phone call from Kafka. While waiting, he has published eighteen books, including Anton Chekhov Was Never in Charlottetown (Stories, Gaspereau Press), Would You Hide Me? (Stories, Gaspereau Press), Misshapenness (Poetry, Ekstasis Editions), Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds (Poetry, Ekstasis Editions), Madhouses in Heaven, Castles in Hell (Stories, Ekstasis Editions), An Unauthorized Biography of Being (Stories, Ekstasis Editions), and Absurdity, Woe Is Me, Glory Be (Poetry, Guernica Editions). Over fifty of his one-act plays and a handful of full-length plays have been performed in Canada and the United States, including the full-length plays The Franz Kafka Therapy Session, The Golden Age of Monsters, and A Television-Watching Artist, and the one-act plays Godot’s Leafless Tree, The Waiting Ends, A Question of Eternity, The Entrance-or-Not Barroom, The Word-Lover, Laugh for Sanity, Back to Back, More Than Money, Imaginative Drinking, In a Washroom of a Prestigious Art Gallery, A Play of Disbelief, and Memory Sounds.
Art: Gianluigi di Napoli, Milano, Lombardia, Italy, @gianluigidinapoli
info@gianluigidinapoli.com, http://gianluigidinapoli.com/