Tobi Alfier
Tobi Alfier’s credits include Arkansas Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Cholla Needles, Gargoyle, James Dickey Review, KGB Bar Lit Mag, Louisiana Literature, Permafrost, Washington Square Review, and War, Literature and the Arts. She is co-editor of San Pedro River Review (www.bluehorsepress.com).
The Brasserie
Today’s sky is a weak imitation of blue.
She slips in the back door, a line cook
at the brasserie in Saint-Germain-des-Prés,
well-known for duck, well-known
for drifters and dreamers, lovers long gone
and those newly found. The man at the bar
will lie his way into any woman’s good graces
but that’s not her problem today, even though
they talk about him in back in many languages.
Duck perfectly rendered, apricots
tender and jam-like as they let go
of summer to tantalize with their scent
before the lunch rush,
haricots verts amandine butter-basted,
and if she has a few extra minutes, help
the pastry chef with crème brȗlée.
Curtains sweep open to her childhood
cooking with maman before the postcard—
dashed off in pencil—au revoir my child,
be strong, love well, you will always
be in my heart. She grabs a small glass
of almost-going-bad Bordeaux
and a bummed-off-a-bad-boy cigarette,
takes a quick break outside,
torn between the touching young words
of that postcard, and the yelling going on
in the kitchen.
She wears drab clothes one could call
military castoffs, and clogs, the footwear
of all kitchen personnel. She walks
the streets of the city before her shift,
goes to the markets, feeds heels of bread
to the fish in many different parks,
watches a gulls wings widen
in the coming-up sun, and greets
the old men playing morning chess,
espresso carts waiting to serve them when
they break—she plants a maternal kiss
on each man’s forehead, she’s known them for years.
They will always be in her heart, even the ones
whose weary eyes are shut against the world.
New Orleans Guidebook
Claudia stopped at Mother’s
on the way back to the hotel. Not her mother’s —
she was good for nothing, and probably at one
of the bars with her name on the barstool,
the one in the corner of each bar by a post
so she could sit facing one side and no one
could surprise her by sneaking up on the other.
Not her boyfriend, not the Sheriff, not Claudia.
Two Debris sandwiches leaking through a paper bag.
All the guidebooks slobbered over them
and Claudia wanted Adam to try them since
he’d mentioned them, of course he had.
And Claudia wanted him to have a wonderful time
so he’d come back. He wasn’t going to meet
her cousins, crazy as the fortune tellers in Jackson Square.
He wasn’t going to meet her father, blackjack
dealer on a Mississippi riverboat, pimp on the side,
drugs if you tipped extra nice and who knows
what else. And of course not her mother.
This was Adam. Sitting behind her in poli-sci Adam.
Crushing her heart in her chest Adam. With
the matching tiny tattoo—bluebird in the web
between thumb and finger on the left hand.
The ring finger hand. The if we’re not married
by the time we’re forty, we’ll marry each other
hand. Sigh. So she’ll be the human guidebook and hopefully
he’ll have a nice time. They’ll walk against the backdrop
of the city, watch their shadows change and listen
to their stomachs growl feed me. She knew about the food,
he’d read about the ghosts. She’ll bring him beignets
in the morning, shave ice in the afternoon, they’ll brunch
at Court of Two Sisters or anywhere else he’d read about,
but honestly, those two sandwiches in that greasy paper bag,
eaten on a bath towel laid across Adam’s bed,
should be all he needs to book his return flight back to her,
again and again.
