Robert Savino Oventile
[untitled]
Water hyacinths again float their pink blooms downriver,
and again flying foxes take wing at dusk.
Another concrete suspension bridge goes up,
gray, with hints of Brooklyn Bridge.
Today, as yesterday, the advice is:
Do not ever photograph the US embassy.
Scooters speed ahead, threading traffic
overseen by shops, colonial remnants, and silver skyscrapers.
Missing their lower jaws, skulls stack neatly in white rows.
Adjacent the hotel bar, a display:
Jackie’s lipstick smudge still decorates a champagne glass.
Robert Savino Oventile has published essays, book reviews, and interviews in Diacritics, Postmodern Culture, The Journal of Modern Literature, Jacket, symplokē, and The Chicago Quarterly Review, among other journals. His poetry has appeared in The New Delta Review, Meniscus, The Denver Quarterly, The Belfast Review, ballast, and elsewhere. He is coauthor (with Sandy Florian) of Sophia Lethe Talks Doxodox Down (Atmosphere, 2021) and author of The Canyon (Atmosphere, 2025). He is a contributor to Local News Pasadena.