Sycamore, Early November after a photograph by Amy Soricelli

by Marianne Szlyk

Half-erased, picked-at, leafless trunks rise
past the chain link fence
and over the tenants’ parking in back.
These trees are not
the mossed-over, well-hydrated
trees out west or down south.
These trees are not
the mellow summer trees
out on the island of festivals.

If someone were to sit beneath
these sycamore trees,
he’d be in some beater
used only to drive out of the city
and to the big-box stores
for the items
he cannot bear to buy
one by one at the bodega.

He’d be hiding
from his apartment,
his roommate, his friends,
all that he stores without closets,
from his bad job, from his worse one.
He’d be plotting
to find someplace better,
someplace other
than the space behind
this building the color
of rancid butter, welfare cheese,
some soundtrack other
than a cassette tape’s tinny
horns and strings,
the vocalist’s Midwestern rebuke.

Or maybe, just maybe
he’d be grateful,
having found this place,
his place for now,
behind the chalk-yellow building
and beneath the trees
at the center of everything,
not that far from
where Ella once sang
Dream a Little Dream
of Me.