Vinni Marie D'Ambrosio, Ph.D.

Poet/Scholar

by Vinni Marie D'Ambrosio, in Pivot

Veronica

 

 

I knew it kept me rare to tell my

rare friends from Queens

we must avoid a bull

when we debarked the BMT.

 

Above the low platform, skies

raced in from New York City, but not

faster than that bull. I

advised us to hide

 

our red scarves or red gloves as

we left the open station, and stuff

them into school bags, and speed

cutting for my house, and duck

 

by the soft blank lots,

the black clouds collapsing in

folds on the horizons, building

us a breathing bullring.

 

It was true. There was a bull

who lived in my Brooklyn then,

in Flatlands. A dark ton,

the core of the arena, beware -

 

he mashed the lots

riding on the Queen Anne's lace

straight for a ruby crucifix

or anything that was red. . . .

 

Those days we were in residence

in a brick two-story

mortared on the marshes, its

long stoop willful, its

 

cellar's eyes sinking, those

days when Wendell Wilkie and

then Tom Dewey were lost

embattled issues

 

in the solid brick house of

my father's governance, where,

slowly being crossed, my

father was - yes, baited -

 

executing his

own growing veronica.

Copyright © 2008 by Vinni Marie D'Ambrosio

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