1. What I have to say belongs to two mountain places: Italy & Virginia. Like all mixed marriages, my story's a marl of sand & silence, limestone & longing. Some people don't like to remember how things come together. I can't stop talking about it.2. My parents married in 1976. My mother, born in Washington, DC, to a Black family with roots in Virginia, grew up in the United Church of Christ. Her home church, in the city's Northwest quadrant, was built in the twentieth century, in an Italian Romanesque Revival style. It has a rose window.3. Worlds within worlds exist. I live here. In the passage that opens when you pronounce African & American. In the stitch that tethers Italian to the good old stars & stripes. When I was a young poet, I used to think it was my job to explain myself in the etymological sense, ex + plānus, to unfold, spread out, flatten. I saw hills of language, dissolving into blue.4. In Italy, my grandfather, Prospero, apprenticed as an iron worker. Mostly, he made locks. Later, in New York City, he forged ornamental gates & window screens for rich homes. Today, I don't know where to begin looking for remnants of his work in the city he helped cover with exquisite vines.5. Dante Alighieri wrote: [t]hus the sun unseals an imprint in the snow. American poet Jack Gilbert wrote: love lasts by not lasting.6. My branch of the Petrosino family began arriving in America in the nineteenth century. Nearly everyone departed from Padula, a place I've described in my writing as “a stony village at the ankle of the Italian boot.” The first Petrosino—that ur-Prospero—was a gifted tailor, frustrated because no man in Padula could afford his specialty: bespoke suits. In my twenties, I climbed to the apex of the town & knelt before the statue of San Michele Arcangelo, the warrior angel who protects us.7. When did I know I wanted to attend the University of Virginia? As soon as I stepped onto its beautiful red bricks, as soon as I tucked myself into one of the deep window seats in New Cabell Hall, as soon as I saw Italian in the course catalog. So I signed the promissory notes for thousands of dollars in student loans. I returned to the Commonwealth where my African ancestors were held in bondage. I fell in love with a plantation.8. I'm middle-named Michelle, after the Lord's warrior angel. In Padula, he still gazes from his plinth of polychrome marble & local stone. When I open Jefferson's Farm Book, I watch him plant olive trees in central Virginia & count up the enslaved children he owns. For UVA, he selected a professor to teach Anglo Saxon & another for modern languages, including Italian. My delight & my sorrow & my dread. They feel so particular, tied to two continents. Bespoke.9. In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down all bans on interracial marriage. The case, Loving v. Virginia, specifically invalidated the Commonwealth's 1924 Racial Integrity Act. That law defined a white person as someone “who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian.” In Virginia, scientific racism flourished. Eugenics—the study of controlled reproduction based on white supremacist ideals of racial “purity”—found a home at UVA, where generations of white doctors & teachers trained beneath the Blue Ridge Mountains.10. For years, in my childhood bedroom, I hung a Gone with the Wind film poster, the one with Rhett Butler & Scarlett O'Hara aflame. You get your strength from this red earth of Tara, Rhett tells Scarlett, naming the half-mythic plantation in Georgia where her past, present & future collide. Returning to Tara in the silver-blue wake of war, Scarlett digs a handful of radishes from an abandoned furrow. She bites down, devouring the earth. In my notes, I type: Tara. La Terra.11. When I Google distance from Italy to the Caucasus Mountains, I get 3,930 kilometers or 47 hours by car. I've never seen those mountains. I suspect that whatever claim to whiteness Italian Americans—particularly those whose ancestors came from the southern half of the peninsula—may possess today deriveth not from the mythical “Caucasian” source eugenicists once prized. So where does whiteness begin? My grandfather spoke of himself, always, as an Italian & as an American. I never heard him say white. Perhaps he didn't need to speak the word. America's racial hierarchy—its perpetual machinery of measurement, categorization & division—muffles the complex melodies of my family's story. I wish to hear Prospero's voice.12. Some weeks during my student days at UVA, I read versions of the same poems in different languages: Petrarch, Dante, Wyatt, Surrey. Back then, I never studied the eugenics movement, or the Racial Integrity Act of 1924. Still, I felt something in the brickwork. A weeping beneath all the beauty. No—marbled into it.13. In 1773, the Florentine horticulturalist Filippo Mazzei sailed to Virginia. He wanted to see if the Piedmont—this region of Central Virginia with the same name as a slice of Northwest Italy—could cultivate wine. Today, the countryside surrounding Jefferson's Monticello is dotted with vineyards. Even Colle, Mazzei's old homestead, is a modern vacation rental, nestled within walking distance of a tasting room.14. Jefferson to William Drayton, 1787: The Olive is a tree the least known in America, and yet the most worthy of being known. Of all the gifts of heaven to man, it is next to the most precious, if it be not the most precious. Perhaps it may claim a preference even to bread; because there is such an infinitude of vegetables which it renders a proper and comfortable nourishment.15. When I graduated from UVA, it rained so hard I couldn't see the Blue Ridge. Still, I walked, like so many before me, into its deep curtain of mist. There's no way to divide myself from myself. I return to this place, wanting to be like what's pressed from the olive: precious, green-gold, infinite.The following five poems are by Featured Poet Kiki Petrosino.