February 28, 2017

a rain filled with shoes

You can buy donuts in Brittany, a 12-pack of miniatures that hold
enough reminiscent sweetness you feel less far from home
than you really are. They call them beignets here, and the word
stretches at the back of your tongue, where you'd left it in 10th-grade French class.
Those years you spent learning how Marie would ask Pierre to the movies,
or what to say when looking for a swimming pool in July - the textbook didn't tell you
it would be like this, the somber echo of your steps on wet February cobblestones
in a sodden town cemetery potted with plastic flowers. Is there a phrase you could have learned
for the hope you keep carrying, indignantly, as the sky opens up with its million question marks?
Une pluie remplie de chaussures. A rain filled with shoes, or something like that.