It's Monday, so it must be time for another Poem of the Week. Enjoy a little travel nostalgia.

paris poem

sitting in a café pretending I'm Hemingway

sipping and stretching out my café au lait,

acting like I'm scribbling away

about bullfights and war and Beaujolais

when really I haven't got much to say

as I perpetrate my male gaze

on the beauty winding through the Parisian maze

trailing French vowels like a perfume haze

that leaves me grinning, dazed and crazy

to rendezvous with a certain French lady

waiting behind her four-digit code

at the top of an art nouveau abode

tucked on a dog-shit-peppered road

where I once smeared a turd and showed

up embarrassed and smelling commode-

like, most incommodious. 

an unpleasant memory best laid away

as I'm pretending I'm Hemingway,

sneaking some bourbon in my café au lait

wondering how to pronounce Beaujolais

and forgetting whatever I meant to say.

Peter Ferenczi


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