Origin Stories - Annamaria Formichella

    Numerology
    by Annamaria Formichella

    The word “quarantine” comes
    from Italian, quaranta giorni—
    forty days or the length of time
    a ship was held in isolation when
    suspected of carrying the plague.

    First spoken in fourteenth-century
    Venice and revisited six hundred
    plus years later. In 2020 quarantine
    and lent are coterminous, contemp-
    oraneous, collapsing and conflated.

    Sacrifice piles upon sacrifice until
    across the country the bishops break
    with tradition. Go ahead and eat
    meat on Fridays, they proclaim.
    You’ve given up enough already.

Origin Stories – Numerology

On Ash Wednesday in 2020, I decided that—rather than making my usual Lenten sacrifice of giving up sweets—I would write a poem every day for forty days. About three weeks later, in mid-March, the lockdown phase of the COVID-19 pandemic began, and the world changed irrevocably. I kept writing poetry, partly as a form of escape and partly to make sense of my emotions. Sometime in the midst of that surreal experience, I researched the origin of the word “quarantine” and discovered that it derives from an Italian term signifying “forty days.” The correspondence between lent and quarantine crystalized for me the themes I had been exploring in my poems–sacrifice, death, and rebirth. “Numerology” is my attempt to record a connection that seemed to represent both loss and hope.

BIO

A native New Englander, Annamaria Formichella currently teaches in the English department at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa. Her creative work has been published in the Knight Literary Journal, Toe Good Poetry, Wilderness House Literary Review, Gyroscope Review, and Litbreak Magazine. She loves the texture of words and the shiver of recognition that happens when you encounter language that moves you.