Working Girls at Jazzfest
We
eye each other up on
Tennessee
William’s
streetcar.
Me with crumpled bills
In
my pocket. She’s Bourbon Street
bound,
morning drunks waiting.
She’s a colicky baby’s
eyes at dawn. Her arms
are damp twigs, nothing
there to coax into flame.
Slap-flat, paddle-spank hands
warming a slug of bourbon in a
cracked ‘world’s best mother’
rummage sale mug.
Daffodil-dyed hair
in a late March haystack up do.
Last night’s cracked patent leather purse
muddy alligator shoes
bayou bound.
She scorns the beads, the second line,
Congo Square music, humid
morning slick on skin,
She’s on the stroll
today in slippered feet;
why bother with red toenails
Why bother at all.
Sunrise
Today is planting day for the farmers
their enamelled furrows enfold
psalms to the Mother
slice into her full-bellied grace.
Blind faith lays claim to
a deserved and promised harvest;
the great awakening earth bed
cradles their gleaming golden dream.
Seeds split open, shoots unfurl.
Their pale filaments grope toward light
turn into shimmer, sheen, wet velvet.
Wash the field with faintest newly born green.
Ode to a Server in a Dying Village
How lovely, to be the one who
brings morning coffee
not with downcast eye or
demeaned spirit,
but singing good mornings
into the village street each time
the belled door swings inward.
Slapping the menu
crisply on the arborite,
fluting a custard pie
with whipped cream clouds.
Running a cloth over
window glass reflecting
the quiet street and god’s clouds
like a monk who arises
intent on humble service, but
with slightly better
tips.
Johanna Antonia Zomers is a playwright with Stone Fence Theatre and writes a weekly column for a Canadian newspaper. Her first novel “When the Light Enters” was published with Pastora de la Vega Press. She is at work on a sequel and a collection of essays. She currently lives on a farm in the Donegal Settlement in Ontario and hopes to return to spending creative winters in Spain and Ireland.
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