Alec Solomita’s fiction has appeared in the Southwest Review, The Mississippi Review, Southword Journal, and The Drum (audio), among other publications. He was shortlisted by the Bridport Prize and Southword Journal. His poetry has appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Gnashing Teeth Publishing, The Galway Review, Bold + Italic, Litbreak, Subterranean Blue Poetry, The Blue Nib, Red Dirt Forum, and elsewhere. His chapbook, “Do Not Forsake Me,” was published in 2017 and is still available at Finishing Line Press and Amazon. His first full-length book of poetry was published last April by Kelsay Press. He’s working on another. He lives in Massachusetts.

Fecundity

To create a really dense root system,
you plant a seed in Venice on a high
bed with the stench of a rippling canal
drifting through the casement window.

The woman says “Viens, viens” at
the crucial moment and the man loses
himself in agriculture, casting
his hasty seed into her womb.

The three transplant to Paris. Rue de la
Grande-Chaumière, in the studio, says the father
to his little boy, where Modigliani lived.
And died, he might have added. Aroma of

crepes float into the room as they conceive
their second child. They name her Jeanne-Marie.
The father misses America and the mother
writes poetry that rhymes with the times

so in a perhaps less than considered decision, they
move to Iowa, but they don’t know from loam
and there are no hills not even like
white elephants. What’s a silo? says the wife,

bleak amid the alien corn, panel discussions, readings,
finding some solace in fooling around on a four-
poster bed in the rented farmhouse, the clucking
of chickens and smell of diesel fuel rising.

New York is next. They can see the Chrysler Building
and heaven as she heaves above him, damp,
distressed tendrils whipping the face below,
the sounds of engines whispering across the sill.

And here’s a peculiar thing. Despite advanced degrees
in design and creative writing, they don’t stop.
They plant and plant and tend their shoots. Other
couples would call them weeds, these seedlings,

but they lose themselves in their endless
brood bursting forth into the echoing world.
In the last suburb, over the scent of lilac and a
ferment of voices, they grind like a muted mill.