PEZZA'S GLOVE
Brooklyn, NYC

The body of Padre Pio, who died 40 years ago and was later made a saint by the previous Pope had been exumed from its crypt, prepared by experts and placed in a glass coffin in SAN GIOVANNI ROTONDO, Italy.

It was exhumed during a three-hour service that ended after midnight. It is now on display allowing his devotees to mark the 40th anniversary of his death. Seven million people visit his tomb every year.

The planned exhumation had been criticised by some relatives and devotees, who did not want the body removed from its resting place.

Padre Pio's body had been buried in a crypt at Santa Maria delle Grazie church in San Giovanni Rotondo, beside the friary where he had lived for most of his 81 years.

Padre Pio, a monk from the Capuchin order, was said to have had stigmata - wounds like those suffered by Jesus Christ during his crucifixion - on his hands, feet and side. They reputedly bled frequently throughout his adult life.

Joe Pezza, a parking lot attendant in BAY RIDGE BROOKLYN was given PADRE PIO'S gloves which covered these stigmata wounds many years ago and describes his experiences with these relics in a piece by Kathi Kosmider.

ARCANIUM – AN ELEGY TO A ROMAN LADY

1998, London. A woman wanders the humid, greasy streets of BRICK LANE, and SPITALFIELDS MARKET in the August nights while noticing an apparition of a woman who passes by from time to time. She begins to go in quest of this entity, not sure where or what this vision could be.

A Roman woman is found under the ground while building a huge corporate mega-building at the crossroads on LIVERPOOL STREET STATION. She is 3000 years old and she is taken to the LONDON MUSEUM, but not until she causes a delay of one year while trying to figure out who this lady was and how she ended up in the area.

THE MAN WHO COULD FIX BROKEN TIME.

When you walk into MADDOX WATCHES.. you immediately step into AL TIME. as if you've slipped thru a wormhole, a rip in time, entering one of these downtown nyc financial buildings that haven't been gentrified, picture a 1940's movie maybe... a movie called.... SIDE STREET, 1950, these buildings that still steam up from the 1920's ornate steel radiators in the hallway, marble floors now a dirty brown, scuffed up, but still sparkles come through, huge wooden windows and the metal staircase, the major thing they've changed is the elevator, and while going up you can sense the elevator attendant who had to crank it up, slowly edging toward MADDOX WATCHES.

When inside, the calendars on the wall are from the 70's, a huge receipt machine, that would crank out receipts in the 50's as huge as a cadillac... they just don't make office supplies like they used to... an old glass display case with tons of 60's and 70's watches, watchbands, necklaces, stuff that hasn't sold and sits awaiting a buyer.. year and year... kind of like Al, who sits there, year after year, fixing watches and fixing time, a solid fixture of commitment of love of a dying craft.

The Slip

THE SLIP was written in 2002 after living in London for 8 years, I returned to New York for a year. Around the time of my return, there was a siege in Bethlehem, a massacre in Jenin Palestine and huge residue of chaos seemed to be spreading on everything I saw and touched. It seemed to me that I could feel the insides of the chaos, which to me was wrapped in a huge injustice, in a lie disguised as a truth not just in that place but it seemed worldwide. This sense of being tricked and this sense of life as a hologram began to take over. I began to sense the souls of the past were now here in the present, in different bodies, taking revenge, not just finalizing unfinished business but almost wanting to keep chaos alive for the sake of everlasting memorial and everlasting pain And that we are all part of this. A sense that we just never learn from the past and that we are molded to replay horror and suffering over and over, endless destiny toward repetition.

THE SLIP is about falling through time, through a wormhole or a stretching of space and how the young woman in the piece telling the story explains her fall which begins at Mr. Man's Barber Shop on the Lower East Side of NYC. She keeps passing out, falling to the floor as gravity pulls her down and eventually towards the innards of the earths core. It is in that place that she begins to see everything there is to see of the world. Here in this place she begins to reveal her visions that come toward her and everything that is now has already been. Everything that was, is happening again. Her theory on souls and bodies, and the great "switch" that occurs comes through the piece and by the end one realizes anyone can go to this place she mentions and see the "forbidden" but the price one has to pay is high when it comes to witnessing and then disappearing.