In Wooster Square, miracles are
fashioned in the shape of warm, oblong
pies spattered with sauce and basil
and dollops of cheese, fringed with
a brittle necklace of coal-crusted
soot. Brick-oven blazed, poppy-red
glistening, each slice as light as
whisper that falls away like grieving
tongues of smoke and slowly meld
with memory conjuring the warmer
comforts that stretch far beyond
this day and fall back, soft as a
vast Venetian night, into the wide,
ample lap of an ancestor’s chair.
