Celebration

Nobody told you how you´d glow
in this city, how fast your energy
would flow. Most days, you criss-cross
its neighborhoods as though riding a bolt
of electricity. It´s only been a week
since you landed on the other side
of the world, but your body, once
unyielding as routine, has become
a metallic version of your pre-nomad self
and you, conductor of emotion, vow
to bend towards any adventure that beckons.
This is your very own renaissance!
You relish the nightlife best, zipping
from café to bar to afterhours hot spots,
ordering food and drinks in the language
you came here to learn. Sometimes
coiled lovers or boisterous groups
of friends flash a glance your way,
which prickles just a bit, but even
as a child, you wore solitude like
a cherished pendant, pressing it to your
chest whenever you felt imperceptible
or were elbowed aside. It was enough
to contemplate other people´s lives.
Besides, when your classmates warm
to your quirky interests, your silences
and eccentricities, you too will have
an arm or three to link yours through.
In high school, you treated your birthday
as a frayed wire you hoped wouldn´t
flare into celebration, but now, halfway
across the world, the lights are off, your
teacher is walking into the classroom
with a cake, everyone is singing to you
in the language you´re all trying to learn
together, and the face in the flames
glows not with shame but euphoria.

*

A Different Kind of Restaurant

           –after reading about Alabama´s Drexell & Honeybee´s

Later, you´ll paint the barbecued ribs
in handsome shades of walnut,
submerge them in springs of hot gravy,
color of cedar. Add sizzle, tang. A taste
that transports you to the backyards
of your childhood, Sunday afternoons spent
scaling trees with your friends while
parents guzzled beers, swapped gossip.
You´ll need a full palette to portray
the vegetables, their flamboyance, the way
they spin across your taste buds clad in nothing
but flavor. They remind you of salsa
dancing, or how your legs lost rhythm after
the divorce. It´s been decades since you ate
a dish that merited an impressionistic flair,
waves of cheese crashing over macaroni shells,
more cheese cascading over the edge of your
senses, a hypnotic landscape of yellows,
oranges, and creams, your fork diving
and diving through the velvety tide, oxygen
an afterthought to perfection. You consider
telling the volunteer about the waterfront job
you lost last month, but there are so many people
waiting in line, so many stories. You´d like
to paint the owners´ portraits, their heart-shaped
faces, eyes generous enough to hold an entire
community in their depths. But first you want
to get the cobbler right. An estuary of berries
gushing out of the crust, crust floating
on an estuary of berries. Only the perfect mix
of blues can capture sweet summer nostalgia.
If you´d nabbed an important career when
dreams of prosperity were still up for grabs,
you´d be able to leave money for today´s
full belly. Instead, you drop a note of gratitude
in the donation box. Promise to return
another day with an offering of beauty.

*

Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, her debut collection published by Kelsay books, and a chapbook, The Jolt: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, published by Bottlecap Press. Her “Poem Written in the Eight Seconds I Lost Sight of My Children” was selected as a finalist for Sundress´s 2023 Best of the Net anthology. She won Sheila-Na-Gig´s editor´s choice award for her poem “Cumbre Vieja,” was named a finalist for the 2022 Saguaro Prize, and was shortlisted for Kissing Dynamite´s 2021 Microchap Series. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her work appears in ONE ART, Chestnut Review, and Random Sample Review, among others. Originally from California, she lives in Spain with her wife and two young children. You can find her at julieweisspoet.com.