Versi Vegetali is a stage of our eight-year lasting journey as literary magazine Mosse di Seppia. It is a poetic anthology, on which fifteen of our editors and poets have worked. The titles of the collection recalls our vocation as a paper magazine and the playful and spontaneous approach of the poetic gesture. La memoria vegetale is a text of bibliography writings by Umberto Eco, to which this poetic anthology is inspired. In exactly the same mood as today, we chose in 2013 the name Mosse di Seppia for our magazine, a name that traces Ossi di Seppia, Eugenio Montale's masterpiece. The publisher Homo Scrivens who published Versi Vegetali is particularly significant for our work as he shares with us some founding values of literary activity, our very homeland (Naples) and the commitment of non-paid publishing.
Verses by: Lucia Abbatiello, Emanuele Arciprete, Emanuele Battiniello, Francesca Calloni, Francesco Paolo Colucci, Annalisa Davide, Damiana De Gennaro, Alessandro Di Porzio, Maria Neve Iervolino, Marzia Imparato, Axel Perugino, Achille Pignatelli, Pasquale Sbrizzi, Luca Tammaro, Maria Chiara Tortora.
Edited by: Annalisa Davide                Translation by: Yasmin Tailakh

But I’m home now
and you’re not here:
it’s time for guillotine.
Open the window, leave me here
inside and outside
shear me.
I want to see what it feels like
to be a sunset
(where everything
– you come back
to your own place
Alessandro, Lucia Abbatiello

And your sorrow is not absent instead.
It advances like spring.
Writes with May’s clouds
the rain that suddenly comes
evoking a closeness
that is not there-
Esilio, Lisa Davide

On the six o’ clock train
friends are falling asleep
Orange sunbeams
slides over the rice fields
I go back to your shadow
wounded by summer.
Senza titolo, Damiana De Gennaro

Time has cleared, my friend.
My only companion, my voice. God.
And when I caress you, cold semblant. I know
that I have a wall, now.
Before me.
Davanti, Francesco Paolo Colucci

Something inside me is terrified of sleeping
as if my eyes were respirators
attached to the mouth of the ones I love
as if I was the center of a reality
that doesn’t hold up without me
that is just earthquakes:
yet another excuse I believe in
to reject stillness?
Nested in chest
it shakes against the looking-glass
it tells me nothing matters
this is not taking care –
the waking hours
like a fever rest
an effort ‘till exhaustion.
Questo non è aiutarsi, Emanuele Battiniello