The Flaca Diaries #18

Bring Me Back Home Again

Daisy's Aunt Carmen watched for dead people

in her hot Bronx apartment.

She used blankets to cover the plastic couch, 

so you could sit with her in July while she told you about 

all the dead children she almost had;

before the spirits took them in the cab a few blocks before the hospital.

How she was racing there with Danny who was late.

How Danny was always late.

Aunt Carmen put a cold champagne cola in front of her,

while her long nails with the diamond chip on the middle finger 

tapped back and forth on the cheap coffee table. 

The tape wrapped around its leg, mummy-like.

She asked if I ever saw dead people I knew.  

Asked if maybe some of my people from whatever old country 

my people might have come from, 

ever visited me while I washed my face

or stood on line to buy milk.

She wondered why I never did, and what was wrong with my spirit.

Daisy told her to watch her mouth.

That my people didn't believe in those things.

I wondered if she was right and would ask later when I got home.

But there were Oreo's and cold milk when later came,

and my grandmother just said 

"there is no one here that is not invited, why do you ask such things?"

She might have asked my mother about this when she got home from work,

in case, you know,

she saw them.

Amy Soricelli has been in the field of career education and staffing for over 30 years. A lifelong Bronx resident, she has been published in Grub Street, Camelsaloon, Versewrights, The Starving Artist, Picayune Press, Deadsnakes, Corvus review, Deadbeats, Cantos, Poetrybay, The Blue Hour Magazine, Empty Mirror, Turbulence magazine, Bloodsugar Poetry, Little Rose magazine, The Caper Journal, CrossBronx, Long Island Quarterly, Blind Vigil Review, Isacoustic, Poetry Pacific, Underfoot, Picaroon Poetry, Vita Brevis, Voice of Eve, Uppagus, The Long Islander, The Pangolin Review, Plum Tree Tavern, Red Queen Literary Magazine, Terse Journal. Ethel5, Stirring Literary Collection, Thirty West, as well as several anthologies. Sail Me Away, (chapbook) Dancing Girl Press, 6/2019. Nominated by Billy Collins for Emerging Writer's Fellowship/2019, Nominated for Sundress Publications "the best of the net" award 6/13, and recipient of Grace A. Croff Memorial Award for Poetry, Herbert H. Lehman College, 1975