I Can’t Tell If It’s Me

by Nicole Santalucia | Jun 9, 2015 | Poetry | 1

At 10am a housewife rips open
a blue and silver can of anchovies
and then spits on the sidewalk.
Ten feet away
men from the gas company
stand on steel plates
and flecks of white paint chip
off row houses,
litter the housewife’s front porch.
The shadows of Mack trucks
flash through the living room.
Her hair, like grease from the underbelly
of an engine, glistens in the sunlight.
This, I say, this is what I want
when I imagine myself
longing for freedom.

Photo by Brad

About The Author

Nicole Santalucia

Nicole Santalucia received her MFA from The New School University and her PhD in English from Binghamton University. She founded The Binghamton Poetry Project, a literary outreach program, in 2011. Nicole won the Ruby Irene Poetry Chapbook Prize from Arcadia Magazine Inc. for Driving Yourself to Jail in July—published in January 2014. Her non-fiction and poetry appear in The Cincinnati Review, Paterson Literary Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, 2 Bridges Review, Bayou Magazine, Gertrude, Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment, and others. Nicole's first full-length collection of poetry, Because I Did Not Die, is forthcoming from Bordighera Press later this year. She teaches English and creative writing at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.