After Googling Your Name I
–for Purple Pam
Plod to the kitchen, gather all the ingredients
and build a sandwich you would have extolled,
my knees weakening under the shock of lost
time. I´m famished for fifteen, for my first job,
how the earth never stopped orbiting your smile,
even when customers stained our aprons with complaints.
For one of your hugs, its galactic blaze, I´d slip my finger
under the meat slicer again. I remember how you
numbed my fear, wrapping your voice around my wound,
kindness everflowing like the hip hop lyrics you mixed, breast-
scratching your path from Foster City catering queen
to Bay Area DJ supernova. Every stage you crossed
radiated in your wake, I read. But I´m fifteen again, life
endless as the salads we scoop, chill as the swimming
soiree at our boss´s house, where you pull me in, your laughter
sparking mine. We glide side by side in a universe that never dies.
*
Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, her debut collection published by Kelsay Books. She won Sheila-Na-Gig´s Editor´s Choice Award for her poem “Cumbre Vieja,” was shortlisted for Kissing Dynamite´s 2021 Microchap Series, and was named a finalist for the 2022 Saguaro Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her recent work appears in Sky Island Journal, ONE ART, and Feral, among others, and is forthcoming in Rust + Moth and Trampset. Originally from California, she lives in Spain with her wife and two young children.
