[Third place winner in the Synapse Storytelling Contest poetry category.]
we moved through the sentence
of the crowd, its fork-plate Sunday
morning music, its underfoot
cacophony of napkins, its endless
clauses and the punctuation
of downtown, its traffic shrieks, its crinkling
white wrapping paper, its
pies and parentheticals, its
beginning ending sounds of meals and
hours, its
crowds, its
rush of people through its
doors, its staple
crunchings, its
contradictions, its slow
drifting and us with it to its
last key points, the plates and
hands and steps we’d been
anticipating, until we passed
the half-and-half
standing patiently in its carafe
and stopped for milk
and I poured and turned toward
the doors all sunshine
bright and singing swinging with
the people coming in
them from the street and I could feel
new sentences beginning, new shoes
traveling like underlines
beneath them and the building and
beginning of the paragraph, its dense
thicket of argument, and more space opening
behind the semicolon that really should
have been a period, and more cars
parking, and more hours
of the day to fill with
words and sounds,
and I made to leave
the bagelry (outside
of which everything
was waiting) when you
said: wait
watch the half-and-half
traverse the glass
and (you
were marvelously right) so
I did
