Blood Orange Days
It’s the beginning of spring.
Damp days and spirits echo winter.
Working remotely, I wait for the phone to ring.
Familiar street noises have dimmed.
Neighbors on walks timidly greet or cross the street.
Trees are shrouded in white wisps.
The wind stopped whining.
A weathervane that hasn’t moved in days
shifts south.
Reports of illness and death pepper my Facebook feed.
I grieve with Giovanna, an Italian friend in Brooklyn,
who buried her father and uncle in Bergamo from afar.
Poets vittoria Ripetto and Bob Barci have passed on.
Little Italy butcher, Moe Albanese, shy of 96 years, is gone.
People crave communion.
In other cycles, yellow daffodils stand tall.
The perfume of violet hyacinths evokes
a calmer time in a bigger world
when travel meant weekends at the Jersey shore.
Pink blossoms on Japanese maples
and weeping willows color the town.
The sun’s shadow shelters leafless trees.
A sole ambulance siren slices the peace.
Bio:
Amy Barone’s latest poetry collection, We Became Summer, from New York Quarterly Books, was released in 2018. She wrote chapbooks Kamikaze Dance (Finishing Line Press) and Views from the Driveway (Foothills Publishing.) Barone’s poetry has appeared in Paterson Literary Review, Philadelphia Poets, Sensitive Skin, and Standpoint (UK), among other publications. She belongs to PEN America Center and the brevitas poetry community. From Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, she lives in New York City.
OVUNQUE SIAMO 