poetry Dance to the Music

Amy Soricelli’s poetry captures the grit of The Bronx: the passing “radio from an open car window” or a “random gunshot.”

Amy Soricelli Freshwater Literary Review
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Dance to the Music

By Amy Soricelli

 

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.

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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 has been published in numerous publications and anthologies including Remington Review, The Westchester Review, Deadbeats, Long Island Quarterly, Literati Magazine, The Muddy River Poetry Review, Pure Slush, The Bronx Magazine, Rumblefish Quarterly, Glimpse Poetry Magazine; Carmen has No Umbrella but Went for Cigarettes Anyway, Dancing Girl Press 9/2021; and Sail Me Away, Dancing Girl Press, 10/2019. Nominations: Pushcart Prize, 2021, "Best of the Net"  2020, 2013. Nominated by Billy Collins for Aspen Words Emerging Writer's Fellowship/2019, Grace C. Croff  Poetry Award, Herbert H Lehman College, 1975.