Amy Small-McKinney
TABLE FOR ONE
Chinatown lit up like a Christmas tree
and being Christmas, with nowhere else to eat,
I find the hand drawn noodle place,
find heaven inside the soup like a sky
filled with thick stars. I pan for each star
and decide not to worry about other diners
noticing me, my head almost in the soup
while the slippery chopsticks refuse
to meet quietly.
Inside those windows above,
families have lived forever, not so different
from how I lived once on a street
with all Jews like me.
As a child, it was hard to know that others existed.
I remember asking my mother the difference
between Christian and Catholic,
that is how unschooled I was in anything beyond
our tight cluster of stars, our own bright galaxy.
Scientists estimate there are at least two trillion
galaxies in the observable universe.
AMY SMALL-MCKINNEY is the author of six books, including her newest, & You Think It Ends (Glass Lyre Press, 2025). She was awarded The Kithara Book Prize 2016 for her book of poems, Walking Toward Cranes (Glass Lyre Press, 2017). Her poems have been published in numerous journals, for example, The American Poetry Review, Tiferet Journal, Connotation Press, Pedestal Magazine, SWWIM, Persimmon Tree, Verse Daily, and Tahoma Literary Review, among others. Her poems have also been translated into Romanian and Korean, and her book reviews have appeared in journals such as, Prairie Schooner, Connotation Press, and Matter. Small-McKinney is a Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate Emeritus (2011).