Michelle Reale
East Vineland, New Jersey, 1930
Genoa Avenue and an expanse as temporal as a bad memory. Jews and Italians shudder in the
sun. The cultivators. The scorned. Everyone with a purpose. Even the sister with the lame leg,
pushes her broom from one side to the other, dragging her heavy shoe across the kitchen
floorboards until the ruts insure she'd made her mark. The father with his hand-rolled
cigarettes and his white, long-sleeved shirts made from altar cloth, bludgeoning the dirt into the
submission his wife will not accept. Here is the brevity of commitment. Here is purification by
all of the aseptic wonders of the world. In the potato house you sleep one tender body next to
another, five to a bed. The Legion of Mary followers regularly collapse and cry at the vision of
hell fire and deprivation while the Jews laughed like the condemned they would be. The harvest
will be good every year, the fields the blessing of the undeserved. An unfurling of misery. An
unfurling of mercy. A revenant who shows himself in the light of day. A tincture for everyone
afflicted in equal measure.
Michelle Reale is an Associate Professor at Arcadia University and she engages in ethnography among African refugees in Sicly several times a year. She is completing an MFA program at Arcadia University.
Return to November 2015 Edition
Genoa Avenue and an expanse as temporal as a bad memory. Jews and Italians shudder in the
sun. The cultivators. The scorned. Everyone with a purpose. Even the sister with the lame leg,
pushes her broom from one side to the other, dragging her heavy shoe across the kitchen
floorboards until the ruts insure she'd made her mark. The father with his hand-rolled
cigarettes and his white, long-sleeved shirts made from altar cloth, bludgeoning the dirt into the
submission his wife will not accept. Here is the brevity of commitment. Here is purification by
all of the aseptic wonders of the world. In the potato house you sleep one tender body next to
another, five to a bed. The Legion of Mary followers regularly collapse and cry at the vision of
hell fire and deprivation while the Jews laughed like the condemned they would be. The harvest
will be good every year, the fields the blessing of the undeserved. An unfurling of misery. An
unfurling of mercy. A revenant who shows himself in the light of day. A tincture for everyone
afflicted in equal measure.
Michelle Reale is an Associate Professor at Arcadia University and she engages in ethnography among African refugees in Sicly several times a year. She is completing an MFA program at Arcadia University.
Return to November 2015 Edition