In some pictures my camera’s collapsed
the cathedral. The panorama fails,

the image’s elegant Medieval proportions
tilted into a marble nightmare,

flying buttresses leaning grotesquely
rather than bearing the Gothic weight

of centuries. If those pictures were true, our limbs
would have stretched into Renaissance arches

as we climbed. But we emerged, squat and huffing,
onto the Duomo’s roof to stand under the Madonnina.

If you had died, we never would have seen
those jutting Alps together, or slurped gelato

in the June afternoon, or laughed
at the grinning stone-carved frog

leaping from the spire with such joy.

by Amie Sharp

Amie Sharp’s poems have appeared in Atticus Review, Badlands, the Bellevue Literary Review, Forge, New Plains Review, and Tar River Poetry, among others. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. A member of the Colorado Poets Center, she is an assistant professor of English at Pikes Peak Community College.

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Cagibi Issue 1

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