Dedicated to and with help from the writers studying abroad in Rome, Autumn 2018
From the relinquished pavilions
& moth-eaten stone
To the cigarette cemeteries
Between the street cobbles
Rome knows how to make us remember
Our own mortality
With its museum rooms of epigraphy
And rows of sarcophagi
That are decorated
With their own amputated heroes.
There’s a demise always in the distance
When even rock gives way to putrefaction.
But then again nothing gets
So brutally beneath the skin
Or do a better job than
The dead cat on the road:
Swelled belly
In a dried puddle of plasma
Squeezing eyes and
Guts like decadent jam
And the rest left to rot.
Kendall Upton is an undergraduate in her final year of studies for a degree in English – Creative Writing. She studied abroad in Rome in Autumn of 2018 on a creative writing program, from which much of her recent poetry and stories have drawn inspiration. She has had work published in other UW literary arts journals such as Bricolage and AU, and plans to pursue a career in the arts after graduating.
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