Family Tree

I.
Corsini/Squillante:
My Papa had to pay an Irishman
to buy the land for his house.
He and Nona saved for years—
he making shoes while she folded greeting cards
at the factory in Needham.

Now the tiny white house:
wine barrels in the cellar,
rows of tomato vines in the back,
an enormous dining room table.

Papa played the banjo at our only family reunion.
Nona and a league of aunts laced fingers
around my wrists and fed me
giant hand-rolled meatballs off plastic forks.

II.
Corsini/Zimmer:
Gampi’s full name is Oresti Corsini, Jr. but he
Prefers Joe.
Lanky and laughing at the picnic table in
his short-sleeved dress shirts.
Drafter retired from Korea retired from NASA
Won’t discuss Apollo 13 which he helped design.
Towers over his little German wife.

My Nana, bulging at the belly, fierce,
pummels him playfully with tiny fists,
then throws a genuine tantrum over an
empty bottle of Italian dressing once
tore up my mother’s hand-sewn prom dress.

III.
Landrigan/Corsini:
My mother, their only daughter, fits here,
on the New England coast of the Mediterranean,
her dark olive skin carrying
turquoise eye shadow, her wild black curls
pinned down with two combs. She is

barefoot in the kitchen, pumping the hand-crank
pasta machine, birthing new yellow linguine
to dry for tomorrow’s second-day party.

Tomato sauce splattered across the
cream collar of my Laura Ashley dress,
I hide from the boisterous neighbors, from
the cowboy kids play-firing at Indians.

Pale freckled Irish-from-my-father skin
and blonde hair and big glasses and too-thin wrists,
fingers tracing the genealogy chart
Gampi printed on the Commodore 64,
taped across the back of Papa’s house.