My Brilliant Friend (Elena Ferrante) and two poems

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My friendship with Lila began the day we decided to go up the dark stairs that led, step after step, flight after flight, to the door of Don Achille's apartment.  I remember the violet light of the courtyard, the smells of a warm spring evening.  The mothers were making dinner, it was time to go home, but we delayed, challenging each other, without ever saying a word, testing our courage.  For some time, in school and outside of it, that was what we had been doing.  Lila would thrust her hand and then her whole arm into the black mouth of a manhole, and I, in turn, immediately did the same, my heart pounding, hoping that the cockroaches wouldn't run over my skin, that the rats wouldn't bite me.
--From My Brilliant Friend, a novel by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions, 2012).  This is the first in a series of four books referred to as the Neapolitan Novels or the Neapolitan Quartet.  Book One is My Brilliant Friend, Book Two is The Story of a New Name, Book Three is Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and Book Four is The Story of the Lost Child.  I was mesmerized by these, but please note that they contain numerous descriptions of interpersonal violence.  (The scenes are not gratuitous or unnecessarily graphic, but they can be quite brutal.  Violence itself is one of the many topics of the books.)      


In my other life the B-17 my father is piloting 
Is shot down over Normandy
And my mother raises her sons alone . . . 
--From "Two Lives," a poem by Carl Dennis, The New Yorker (April 18, 2016), pp. 66-67.


at length: the moon opens

a blank after the all-night
          crying.  Early morning, inexplicable

hush.  The toy endlessly chiming in the attic . . . 
--From an excerpt from Substantial (a love letter), poetry by Gina Franco, West Branch Wired (Winter 2016).