She just wanted something beautiful to say. Her mouth was always empty, vacant of something truly beautiful. The people around her market stall meandered onward, to her dismay, all vacant zombies, soulless of wanting to know what beauty really was. To her, true beauty was to create it. And for this urge, she felt estranged from herself. The notebook, the nice leatherbound one her father bought her, stared up at her blankly. Its pale white face contradicted her full, intricate dark one, and yet beauty seemed to lie nowhere in between. 

A buzzing fly landed crudely upon the blank page in her lap and rubbed its legs together. Mocking her. Even this brainless, disgusting shit-eater could mark the page with more beauty than she could, because after all, wasn’t disgust only possible because of beauty?

Here in Palermo, as the sun glared down upon the island at the center of the Mediterranean, she felt unakin to the city that had birthed her. Another Sicilian daughter of a butcher, another Sicilian beauty with too much to talk about and nothing really to say, another dark eyed body for Americans to gawk at. 

Italy, the peninsula of creation, the shaft thrust into the womb of Europe that let go the seed of rebirth, the land of Petrarch and Alighieri, and yet she can’t stumble forward a few sentences of beauty in her notebook.

She shooed the fly away from the paper and her pen made contact with the white of the page. It forced a black mark upon the barren white. She rolled her eyes and cursed the world for this little fly, a small yet infinite part of fate’s finger, had nudged her into the direction of creation, and this creation was what she wanted and what she could not see truly as beauty.

Her pen squibbled onto the page, and she wrote:

Sono qui, affamato, la mia ciotola è piena.

Tutto ciò di cui ho bisogno è mettere il cibo nella mia bocca.

Tuttavia, non posso. Nessun sapore è robusto,

Nessun gusto appagante.

Le mosche ronzano sopra il pasto,

Più degne del suo nutrimento.

E così solo le mosche possono mangiare la bellezza,

Forse sono sempre state le uniche

A conoscere il suo sapore.

It translates to:

I am here starving, my bowl full.

All I need is to place the food into my mouth.

Yet, I cannot. No taste is hardy, 

No flavor fulfilling.

The flies buzz upon the meal

More worthy of its feeding.

And so only the flies can eat the beauty,

Maybe they’ve always been the only ones

To know its taste.