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by E. Doyle-Gillespie

Makeshift Paris
sidewalk cafe'
Top of the World
2:30 PM Thursday and I am smoking lazy like Dad with
his filters on our porch, Hanover, midsummer night in nineteen-seventy-something,
old wing-back chair, Jack Daniels white t-shirt and
Van Morrison from our beaten-up old Blaupunk.
His move on the hand-carved set
that I brought back from Germany, he stops
to listen to Helen's last dress --missed in the frenzy to escape--
flutter, invisible, on the clothes line.
He drifts off with cotton snapping in a nighttime wind.
Now, seated in my twisted iron chair below the torn awning that
they roll out in summer and leave up through autumn,
I retrieve myself from dog-eared pages
of Spatsky and Fisher grudging in Rekyvek
long enough to see Latina woman,
.my age... maybe yours... maroon streaks dyed in
black hair and taffy brown, cross against
the light.
Dance tight top, leotard second-skin and boots.
Wrap-around skirt reminds me of you with tinted lenses
and wire rims, kneeling to pick up fumbled Miller in front of
Eaton's Used Books and the night,
after classes, that you let me taste your fingers
on the fire escape stairs.
Coffee comes late and cold
and I watch as
she winds her way through the tables
up the street
and off across the
park.