Kenneth DiMaggio’s work has appeared in Floyd County Moonshine and The Chiron Review. He writes: “Somewhere between the velvet painting of a French Impressionist landscape in my red, white & blue collar bungalow growing up and reading Camus’ novel The Stranger, where kids my age were supposed to drag-rade GTOs or Camaros and not read books, I fell in love with Paris, or the idea of it. Eventually, as I read more books, I would fall in love with other cities, some of which I vowed one day to visit. But if the real Mona Lisa was much smaller than expected (and hard to get close to, with all the tourists taking selfies next to it), the chapel shrining the incorruptible body of a saint* and the bed bugs in the mattress of my 1-star hotel in the seedy 10th arrondissement, showed me another beauty to this city, subject of one of these poems; the other of a city that has a black-eyed kind of beauty.” DiMaggio teaches humanities at Capital Community College, in Hartford, Connecticut.

*In the Chapel of the Miraculous Medal.

Image: from Insight Cities