Bloody Italians

Inspiration

Bloody Italians was originally written for Round Six of the 2010 STIRRED POeTS competition held on The Write Idea forum. I have no recollection of what the prompt was, or what it scored. It may have been something to do with opera.

Placings

Bloody Italians was highly commended in the 2014 Fire River Poets competition. As a result, I was invited to read at the winners' event and I was a bit rubbish, because it was the first time that I'd been asked to read a significant number of poems in public, and I just stood up and read them without giving any commentary, to a sea of blank faces. I hope I've learnt a bit since then.

Notes

My favourite line in this is the one about her lover leaving her with nothing but silk stockings full of ladders, which is a convoluted reference to Rossini's opera La scala di seta, or The Silken Ladder. Well, I liked it anyway,