2 minute read
Amy Soricelli
Amy Soricelli
Dance to the Music
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The Bronx is a radio from an open car window. It fills your hair with bits of grass from that park where the kids used to leave beer cans and crack pipes. Now it’s service dogs with little jackets. They have human names and sleep with their paws under their chins. It wasn’t always that.
Before I was in high school the Bronx was one flat shade of beige. It was watered-down lunch on paper plates. It was broken textbook spines and nasty margin notes. The Bronx was what you remembered when the dentist said open wide and only fear was left on your tongue. That was mostly how it was.
Some summer nights the Bronx was a garbage-can fire and someone’s uncle calling ‘hey flaca’ from his broken stoop across the street. Some summer days the Bronx was one long whistle from Hector when someone brought around a new bike. But the Bronx will always be a random gunshot and Sly and the Family Stone from the front seat. It will always be that.
Amy Soricelli
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I had a dream about Indiana once. I was wearing a straw hat and had one toe in a lake. Someone from camp was born there, and she followed me into my sleep. I never lived there though, but I sense what it might be like.
I am not from Puerto Rico, but my best friend from third grade had a grandmother who cooked rice in a pot that made me cry. Her lace curtains came from her aunt, and had photographs woven into the seams. I don’t speak Spanish, but I dream in bright colors.
I kissed a girl once in the back of the camp pick-up truck, but she liked it more than I did. She sat next to me for a whole week at the end of the summer, and then told me she hated me on the bus ride home. I never actually dated a girl, but I can imagine how that would be.
Sometimes there are just a few cans in the cupboard, and nothing anyone is interested in can be found in the icebox. I struggle with the covers like a boxer, and often end up on the floor. I never lived in a hut, in my car, down South by a train I was never lost, but if it helps, I can be lonelier than you.
