Sophia Loren Making a Pizza

Published in INSCAPE 2019

Benjamin Harnett
2 min readSep 7, 2019
“It’s been a hard day; we deserve this.”

This is the kind of thing we post now,
in-between pleas for a restoration of sanity
and airline customer-service complaints,
in-between links to articles about celebrity beefs,
and articles about the slow-motion apocalypse,
of global warming. An old, colorized picture
of Sophia Loren, in Napoli, making a pizza.

“It’s been a hard day; we deserve this.”

I have to wade through GIFs to get to it,
a Japanese mascot running
from bombs, in another a large bear on a small
bench, in a pristine wilderness,
yawns. Sophia is not dressed for it.
A small can of tomato paste has two plump
tomatoes, pressed together like breasts.

“These are upsetting times, folks. So — ”

A dish of anchovies. A glass of olive oil
that the colorist should have tinted green
and not brown. She swirls sauce onto
the dough with slices of Bufala. Her cowl-neck
opening to her perfect breasts, a nip of black lace
is dusted with flour. The light of the future
softens her skin, swirls up through her hair,

like fire. Makes a double shadow on the tile,
one upright, the other bent in prayer.
Her fingertips are wet,
it isn’t, but could be blood.
Sophie Loren making a pizza,
if you dare.

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Benjamin Harnett

Historian, poet, digital engineer. Fiction at @mooncityreview, @longform, & @BklynQly. http://www.benjaminharnett.com