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31 Elegy in memory D. K., Scrovegni Chapel, Padua “Even Duccio can’t match Giotto’s stage management of great tragedy”: Transgendered Professor Y in leather miniskirt paces before the screen, wood pointer scraping saint faces, slapping hunched women of the Lamentation. Blue-gold tumult of the chapel walls. After-lunch lecture hall heat. You’re in that class with me. We go on from there—not long. You do “The Waste Land” in different voices—Come in under the shadow of that red rock—Strom Thurmond, Aussie bartender, Cantonese. HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME. Twenty years later, I get your news by Facebook update, three hundred characters or less, waiting for the Scrovegni to open in the windy square across from Donatello’s horse-and-rider, dust flecks foaming past fetlocks and stirrups. You’re someone I slept with long ago, stopped, pitied, forgot. Some remember the Berlin Wall, some remember Vietnam or the first Gulf War, I don’t remember you except standing by my chair in the smelly bedroom, blue sheets undone. You scrub at your head wet from the shower, drop the towel on the floor. You ice my earlobe, light a match to sterilize the needle: Give me a small red new potato, you say. Kev pierced my ear with a needle and potato. We were drunk, maybe tripping. Mom was waiting 32 when I came in, 3 a.m., and saw the blood. . . . You jab. No pain. A tearing through resistance, tissues numbly separating. You do your mom: JesusMaryandJoseph! she screamed. Have mercy! ...

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