Venetian Ladies With Dark Green Faces

(1st prize winner of the 12th Night Contest. January 2025)

Before becoming Dark Green, our faces were cast and polished and mounted high to watch over our canal. 

Now we’re sinking and tides have swollen, licking our mossy cheeks. Over centuries salt-weeds have climbed, wrapping ever tighter, our drowned mouths silenced by oily waters amid the trash of a collapsing city.

When these ears and eyes are at last doused by rising seas, we’ll learn to observe things underwater. Come to know each barnacled hull and gassy motor churning the silt, the seductive swish of a gondolier’s stick. We’ll envy the tourist’s manicured hand trailing the surface, red nails glinting like fish food. 

In the tidal murk, we’ll spy on the sunken dead. They’ll glow—a shaft of sun gracing a moment, stabbing between buildings to reveal picked white bones nestled amid lost possessions.

For now, our Dark Green Faces still peek above the waterline, brows forever furled, bronze nostrils inhaling an ambrosia of roasting meats, of bread dipped in olive oil. Of sweat and sweets. 

Before becoming Dark Green, we were Bright Gold. Doges, redolent in their splendor would pass beneath smiling, their pulses quick at the sight of us, their lives so pitifully short.