Midnight Has Lost its Spell describes the Venetian lagoon. It was written while living in Venice, June 2014; vocal recording done on the shore of the Tyrrhenian Sea in Tusa, Sicily, July 2025)
Midnight has lost its spell
When in the morning dappled haze
I await some sort of magic
That materializes more perfectly than I could have imagined
In secret rooms whose walls dissolve
Into ethereal color
An intense serenity threatens
To vanish us fingertip by fingertip
When in a noontime of climbing ivy, falling jasmine
Lions perch, stoically surveilling rooftops
Women turned to stone peer over garden walls
Black rabbits pulled from thin air
When evening’s molten waterways tilt their heads back
To swallow the flaming sword of the sun
Midnight has lost its spell
In light of all those other hours
Until midnight falls again
And the liquirizia black on the vaulted palate
And the grasses, black in the night, whisper in the shadows
And we levitate over waves of glossy obsidian
We and the waves
Enchanted, resplendent and light
Serena Perrone • SHE/HER • Italy/USA
Serena Perrone is a multidisciplinary artist based between Atlanta and Italy. Her work is collected by numerous institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Philadelphia Museum of Art. She is represented by Cade Tompkins Projects and is a member of Ground Floor Contemporary collective.
