Breathless Vision

Amy Soricelli

she swears she sees God dressed up in a tight raincoat hovering over the sand-swept platform;
she does think to herself what an odd place to drop leaves in a pile by the garbage can -
and wonders if this person - who looks like God - notices this odd place and maybe for a minute-
that fleeting kind of minute -
she can share some moment of silly harmless recognition with some stranger -
some God-like stranger -
and that this standing long hard on this platform with the rocks piercing her eyelashes like some nasty ghetto snow -
would make sense of things -
or at least not make things seem as terribly fucked up as they do sometimes when she shares the glass pine needle streets with
all the lost boys from high school who kept cats in cages and had grandmothers who never kept candy in jars
or were ready for you to come over -
but the kind who spent too much time with their hair in blue sections of dye or who whispered secrets
that had no meaning but for the hollow sound it makes as you roll it around in your mouth long after everyone has gone home and you're left with that mothball smell
and reminder that God does not wear raincoats or stand beside you watching the same sky without a word.