ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO

This puppet’s a rogue. You wouldn’t know it 
from Disney. He kills the talking cricket 
whose advice —”go to school, learn a trade”—
goes in one wooden ear, out the other. 
It’s 19^th-century Italy, land of Risorgimento 
& hard knocks. Boys who can’t read
are little men, hardened, hungry.  

When two low-lifes, a fox & cat, 
try to pry open Pinocchio’s jaws 
& steal his four gold coins, he chomps
one thief’s paw off. Collodi hangs him
from an oak to teach the raucous, young 
nation what happens to those who don’t 
listen, but resurrects him when readers 

of the illustrated journal for bambini
demand more avventure. 

FAIR SKIN

White like me, what my mother called fair, Brian had melanoma caught in time, scooped from his arm. I’m squamous so far. 

In Brighton Beach my Roman husband sizzles, sprouts expansive moles. Our neighbor Señora Perez walks under an umbrella, the rain kind, to the Q train. “No, gracias,” she would not like to be “more brown.” Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s tycoon prime minister, a former cruise ship singer, called Obama “molto abbronzato”—very tan. 

I envy Brian’s superior care. Every two months, the experts scan & photograph his spots. I get a yearly once-over from a doctor who doesn’t look under my bra unless I ask him to. 

Though he hates hats, Brian’s been ordered to wear one. I send him subway pics of Stetsons, Borsellinos, backwards Yankee caps, porkpies, berets, a blue-gray cashmere newsboy like the one Tom Ripley purchased in the Cunard first-class haberdashery, changing identities. 

“Too mature,” he texts back, “too hipster, too New York, too Ripley.” As teens we tanned the wrong way, slathered Johnson’s Baby Oil, baked until our eyes swelled shut. Popped blisters on each other’s backs, watched our layers leak fluid, flake off. By summer’s end the damage turned golden.

Hilary Sideris has poems in recent issues of OneArt, Free State
Review, Great Weather for Media, Rhino, and Right Hand Pointing. She is the author of Un Amore Veloce (Kelsay Books 2019), The Silent B (Dos Madres Press 2019), Animals in English (Dos Madres Press 2020), and Liberty Laundry (Dos Madres Press 2022.) Her new collection, Calliope, is forthcoming from Broadstone Books. She grew up in Indiana and lives in Brooklyn, where she works as a curriculum developer for CUNY Start, a program for underserved, limited-income students at The City University of New York. Sideris can be found online at hilarysiderispoetry.com.