We learned young, religion  
was thicker than blood,
blood thicker than San Pellegrino.
This was how it went down
with mother’s sisters,
nieces, nephews,
mother’s immigrant mother,
who pleaded with us in broken English
to come back to their religion.
Still crying, she’d beat-beat her factory fist
against her sacred heart.

We became foreigners
to first cousins overnight.

Our arrival hushed silent
their chatty mothers
seated at the table
of God’s good bounty:
prosciutto, ricotta pies,
homemade gnocchi,
port figs, antipasto.

How we clung
to mother’s holy hemline
as she walked her daughters
step-by-step into grandmother’s
confession-sized vestibule:
she was now our Blessed Mother,
our Ava Maria in exile.

The stigma soon stung
in Northeast Philadelphia,
where we - sisters
grew up playing Barbie’s
with Irish, Catholic school girls:
attending their Holy Communions
in bland, Baptist dresses,
envying the way their white dresses twirled  –
and oh how they’d TWIRL,
those prepubescent, little brides of Christ.
We were never truly trusted by their mothers.

I grew up wishing we were Juden - Jewish,
the chosen, the beautiful daughters of Esther,
bright, yellow stars in God’s bloodline
but we were gentile, ordinary, dago,
attending church with the Anglos
where we – sisters
taught their pure children
dirty words in foreign tongues
screaming in unison:
vaffanculo,
uno che va in culo a sua madre,
un pompinaio,
on the pristine playground
underneath the monkey bars.