I Try to Teach My Best Friend How to
Read My Poetry

I try to show her how the words are not just the shape of the box 
and the four corners, but the space between the space 
that rests on the bottom, and possibly on the sides.
She doesn’t always see the man crossing the street is my broken dream
from seventh grade, or that the knives down my throat 
are my father leaving us.
It is hard for her to imagine that when the starless sky hangs its flat
shine across the clouds and the air—
it’s actually the million failed math tests and my mother working late, 
climbing the stairs; a shadow resting its head on her shoulder.
It would be easy if every curve of the road was just a decision,
but it is really the lonely whispers in the night holding me close,
warning me against almost everything.
She tries to picture the flurry of restless trees as a forest,
but they are really all the people who didn’t love me.
Every crack in the sidewalk is a place my heart fell into.

Lady on 42nd Street and Madison

How many of us are praying with our hands cupped together?
How many of us sit by the Bible thinking chapter and verse?
Maybe we are standing on the street corner with nothing
but hope filling our shoes.
The woman in front of me has stains on her dress.
They are old stains designed into the floral pattern.
She’s had them a long time.
Her hair is covered with dust.
She doesn’t live in a house.
She is screaming into a small book of scriptures while
everyone hurries by.
No one is sharing their God.

AMY SORICELLI

Amy Soricelli has been published in numerous publications including Dead Beats, Long Island Quarterly, Voice of Eve, and The Long Islander. Sail Me Away (chapbook), Dancing Girl Press, 2019. Nominated by Billy Collins for Emerging Writer’s Fellowship (2019) and for Sundress Publications’ Best of the Net 2013. Recipient of the Grace C. Croff Poetry Award, Lehman College, 1975.