Mary Jo Salter
Roman Haiku
You spotted them first
at the Spanish Steps’ florist:
bought me those tulips.
*
Vatican map room:
there’s my grandparents’ birthplace,
Castellaneta!
*
Domed by umbrellas,
we left the long line, sad to
give up St. Peter’s.
*
Thanks, taxi driver—
when you got lost, we circled
the Colosseum.
Mary Jo Salter's ninth collection of poems, Zoom Rooms, will be published by Knopf in the spring of 2022. She is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, and lives in Baltimore.