Roberto Salvador Cenciarelli is an Italian poet of Chilean origins based in London. His work is mainly concerned with the themes of displacement, queerness and the playfulness of language. He is the recipient of the 2023 Chelsea Arts Club Trust award for writing.
Instagram: @robertoc.salvador
Email: backdoorkitchen47@gmail.com
DNA test
There is no doubt I was born
an invasion like horses galloping
over calabash fields, I crossed
many a stream of water. Percentages
evenly entrenched on each side
of the ocean. A chromosomic draw.
And who’s keeping score? I ask
At least, what’s your money on?
Mostly, I am placing the bets but
science is exact and it is not
speculating. I speculate:
however this ends, it did start
in a hospital. Someone approaches,
unspecified. Pregnant? Someone
else nodding. To get here
from there. In bed with you,
talking birds in the morning.
I am manufacturing tiny pleated birds
out of my percentages so I can say
thrush. You swallow. Our birds
talking. You want to know
my favourite. I say none. Because
the way I am living is already living
all birds under a cherry-picked sky,
my birds like horses, galloping over
calabash fields. No matter how small
I fold them, they’re returning.
However this ends, it ends
somewhere. In a hospital, someone,
more than thirty years ago, saying
to someone else, unspecified, it’s a boy.
Saying [insert name] and I begin.
Photograph
Under the railway bridge, the stall keeps us tepid,
like an ashtray. We don’t know what to wear
towards the end of an English summer. It never occurred
to us it would be different. Double jackets
in the morning, hauling fridges in Borough market, sweaty,
in our good clothes, hauling tables off Covent Garden.
You took a picture of my first day at work. I am standing
next to a child sized rabbit, holding my rucksack
in front of the camera, like an astronaut before the launch.
I keep it on my wall. In the kitchen, I cut oranges in half,
my thumb smells of rind and blade. I give you two hands,
white skin and a lemon squeezer. We spend the afternoon
drinking Mimosas and chatting wool jumpers, the noise
of foxes shagging and Bramley apple jam which is to say
we assign seasons to everything. I give you back your
hair. You have acquired a rock’n’roll wisdom, the kind
that goes seen that, done that, fuck that and a taste for
avocado on toast. Of course, I’m making up your voice
because that’s how this memory works. I place you
on the wall, inside the frame, on the opposite side
of the photograph, crouched on your knees,
baseball cap lifted at the back of your head, leaving
room for the camera, directing me a little to the left,
back to the right, ready to shoot. Stay still. Stay there.
Poem that starts in a restaurant I worked at, but ends in a restaurant I’m eating in
I am making a bad salad out of this. Everything was trying to speak
a different language. Saltshakers shedding their cricket songs. Eggshells
cracking differently one from the other. A lesson in loss. I was a tenant
in my own mouth. I could not tell myself from objects. Back then,
I was a whisk. I was full of eggs and beating, over and over. I had no clue
what these cabbages and carrots wanted me to say before a chopping board,
I chopped like language because I knew language too held a loud knife
by the handle. One fact is that coleslaw comes from the Dutch, meaning
cold salad. I wanted more. I wanted more spring to come, I wanted free
passage through winter, I wanted to look down at the stars in the sky
on the water of a mop bucket and then look back up to check
what had disappeared. That sort of knowledge. No one will tell you
the sky is losing light. Another fact is, on average, one to three stars die
every year. There used to be comfort in those zesty erasures,
in how the mop made the floor forget its past with a thorough stroke,
in the lemon rind silence of the bleach. There’s enough left unsaid.
It scares me that I could point at a saltshaker, right now, and have it
handed over just like that, without a word, without ever being asked how
did they sound, those cricket songs?
Gait
One moment it’s Tuesday, the next
you have moved to the Republic of cats
at the border they scrutinise your gait
squeeze your calves like talismans
have you flip your paws up and down
question your teeth for sharpness
examine your nostrils as though
you could use them as hideouts
all the while you pause and purr, pose
and meow Oh my! You meowed
so much no one noticed you were
a dressage horse in the first place.