12.9.09

Kali jones and her stories.

‘he seemed like a nice man. He had two wives.’
Eating sheep’s brain with the man of two wives.
The sheep’s head offering in a village where she was shown the video of the calves with their throats slit, slipping all over the blood-covered terrace, bleating bleeding. The children parading the heads on sticks in the streets.

On the terrazzo she shows me the marks in the tree from the cat years ago who finally got to the family of baby birds they were protecting. In her sweet light accent she speaks of the bits of nest and feathers. All that was left.

I tell her she reminds me of flannery oconnor. The punchlines always in the gut. Her response is the story about the pregnant female cat who used to hang around on the terrace, beautiful one day she showed up with an empty belly, alone. Sometimes when cats give birth they are so weak that they have to eat their babies. Especially in siracusa.




Standing in the kitchen in a breezy marmalade nightgown, Italian coffee boiling over into the fire on the stove, facing me with hands clasped pressed over her face, suddenly remembering a dream.