WATERMELON FIELDS OF TUFO
White bed sheets
on clothing lines, hanging
across from tan and white houses
dance with Tufo’s summer wind.
Butchers with pig’s blood
smeared on their rough hands
and white aprons stand
beside dangling meat
displayed on their windows
and with boisterous, strong voices
they call out to the people buying
their meat.
Golden-orange sunlight
behind the houses’ rooftops
casts and stretching their shadows
from the dirt streets of Tufo
to the watermelon fields.
Watermelons, ripened with sweetness,
are scattered across the fields,
embedding and coiling their roots within
Tufo’s red clay soil. Evergreen vines
with leaves spread, like green veins,
nourishing their saccharinity redness
with sunlight and red clay.
Their green stripped skins are bathed
in farmers’ sweat and the Earth’s soil
underneath the morning sun.
Children with brown overalls
and white dresses smeared with dirt,
run through the watermelon fields,
picking and with a dull pocket knife
cutting through the watermelon’s green
stripped skin into crescent shapes.
The children run, sat and tasted
the watermelon’s sweetness
underneath the trees’ shading,
looking over the watermelon fields
of Tufo.
BIO:
Christina Ciufo is a passionate writer of poetry, short stories, flash fictions, fables, and completing her first novel. After graduating Sacred Heart University with a BA in English, she continued to expand her writing abilities at Manhattanville College’s MFA Creative Writing Program and by May 2017, graduated with an MFA degree in Creative Writing. She completed Sacred Heart University’s Education Program in December 2018 with a MAT in Teaching in both elementary and secondary. She is currently a Sunday School Teacher at St. Timothy’s. She has appeared in Gravitas, Spillwords, Ovunque Siamo, Nymphs, Vamp Cat Magazine, Z Publishing Ohio, Truly Review, Mookychick, Door is a Jar Magazine, Bonnie’s Crew, The Poetry Question, Twist in Time Magazine and Moonchild Magazine.
OVUNQUE SIAMO 