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.)
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