Rae

Many times in your Bronx apartment,

I showered with the window open

to the five-story tree that broke your cousin’s fall

when he leapt from the roof on purpose.

He said it wasn’t the branches that caught him,

but his dead father’s trench coat.

What I didn’t tell you was

sometimes I heard it flapping,

buttons clicking against buttons,

and saw, from the corner of my soap-blurred eye,

a bush of leaves turn beige in the summer,

before blinking, and they were emerald again.

Author of the article

Vincenzo Anastasia is a poet, photographer, and filmmaker with a B.A. in Creative Writing from Western Connecticut State University. His poems have appeared in a Writerscorp anthology, Minarets, Quarter Press, and on bus shelters in downtown San Francisco. He lives in Connecticut. Read more on his website or Substack.