The day before school started Gina told us about her brother 
taking two buses to seventh grade. His balled-up angry fists
got expelled last year right before the first graders taped 
their turkey hand prints against the classroom glass. 
The principal told her mother that there wasn’t room 
in his small brick building for anger that large. He probably 
looked down at his shoes when he said it.  He told
Gina’s mother that her son hurled chairs onto desks, 
pounded fists through closed doors. That her son needed 
a school with bars on the window. Gina’s mother studied 
the route that would take him twelve blocks and a climb 
up a steep hill. The second bus would drop him across 
from a gas station and a dirty park. The next time I saw 
Gina’s mother it was just after Thanksgiving. She was 
outside the supermarket leaning against the glass. 
She was staring at the turkey hand-prints the local 
elementary school put up. She looked like someone
whose son took two buses to seventh grade.

– Amy Soricelli

Author’s Note: I live in the Bronx, and this poem has lived in my head for as long as I’ve lived there.