Ann Pedone

Ann Pedone is the author of The Medea Notebooks, The Italian Professor’s Wife, The Best Kind of Love (If a Leaf Falls Press, 2025), as well as numerous chapbooks. Her poetry, non-fiction, and reviews have been published widely. Her project “Liz” was a finalist for the 2024 Four Way Books Levis Prize. Ann graduated from Bard College and has a master’s degree in Chinese Language and Literature from UC Berkeley. She is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of antiphony: a journal & small press.

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July 8

The metaphor I’ve been using is all wrong, what I should have been saying is that the dogs here are all pornographic, the man with one eye selling fish in the marketplace is pornographic, so is the bus to Delphi, it is my wooliest thing. 7:12 am & then 7:13 am. Even as the man behind me is busy recording his own digestive noises straight out the window or all there really is of mind and someone else’s perfect philology. Be a dear and trade me your bag of plums for my temple stink. I am in love with a particularly ugly face. 7:18 am & then 7:20 am & then 7:22 am.

July 9

And not just because the priest was caught blowing his brother-in-law the day before last Wednesday or Tuesday or five Januaries ago. Mechanized time is obscenest weather or everyone here who says it’s important to keep the ancient grammar otherwise it’s all nothing but plate of day-old imported blue cheese & then 7:23 am.

July 10

If you can manage to get a room at that place across the square then we can fuck until six, or at least a kind of mythological winged creature, one with a severely duct-taped mouth. Last night after the anesthesia wore off I wrapped myself in the warmest thing I could find, quail eggs and all too-sudden mind.

July 11

And saw that the semen on the bathroom mirror was simmering. Flowering into a different sort of animal. It’s exactly that kind of boredom that I’ve been trying so hard to achieve. 5:11 pm.

July 12

Question: What do you call a body that rejects the need for ventriloquism? Answer: Parataxis, or the careful placement of one cheap chandelier next to a very expensive one.  & then 8:10 am. How it smarts when the sun sets on your testicles, covered with moss. I am still blaming you for my concubine fetish, my rarest bird. To notice that neither of us has ever had measles. Or an unattainable mother, and so apologetically I turn the ancient city of Troy back into the silk negligee I bought last spring at Bloomingdales. 7:55 am. Did we split the driving fairly, on the way back from Croatia? And you said, το σπέρμα είναι πάντα σφαιρικό. A stealth lacquering of the pews. All of them down on the floor with their small plastic containers of cottage cheese. 6:10 am & then 6:11 am & then 6:12 am.

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