Member Poem

Mademoiselle Cérémonie

You step out onto this mean street

in a cheap beanie saying

you want to look iconoclastic.

I assure you all that is graven

is disillusion

and the only image is my neighbor,

naked, the blinds up and the lights on,

praying she’ll squeeze

that flesh into a crinoline gown

from Mademoiselle Cérémonie,

marked down like

Friday’s overripe tomatoes.

I wear a hooded coat, monk-like.

We skim the maw of the café,

temple of horses and joe.

Slip through punters’ seamy residue

thick with unconfessed sins,

tramp in gutters, inhale fumes that curl

behind shoddy cars into the

Place de l’Eglise,

my hand in my pocket, not the link

of your arm, groping for loose change,

an offering

great enough to get me out of here.

(First published in Off The Coast, summer 2016.)