Magic Eye
Lee Briccetti

If she had amnesia walking down Canal Street...
"Ach, what's to know," says the deli-man in her mind
holding up a thin piece of Genoa salami
which, if she did not remember herself, could not mean father,
Saturday chores at home. How would God enter,
and where would she look, if at all.

This was a game she played: did her perceived self
actually smother curiosity about mathematics and sports?
Though she felt certain the little girl's pudgy feet
in white sandals would always move her.
The doctors would tell her she had no children.
And obvious scars, the languages she understood,
would reveal a past.

Empty and open, she would perhaps rediscover her choices.
Or what she likes, who she's related to
—and that's the tricky part, who knows anything about her?
who is it she knows?

© Copyright 2005 by Lee Briccetti
originally appeared in Day Mark, Four Way Books, 2005

Lee Briccetti was born in Italy and raised in the United States. She has been the long-time executive director of Poets House. She has received a New York Foundation for the Arts Award for Poetry and has been a Poetry Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.