Assume I’ll Be Fashionably Late

by Elly Katz

Artwork: Jetty Beach, Cynthia Yatchman

Even the morning dreams of it

That life spent mainly
Bent over things

Torn textbooks at Widener Library or seeping
Inkwells those Cajal axons
Paper clips and pencil cases

Blood from the venison
Stained mother’s apron
An ironing board
Perfect perpendicular
She sipped espresso as she pressed
All her gravity into my school tartan
Erased the possibility of a wrinkle

Wrapping smoked salmon in pita
As bombs fell
Elsewhere far away

We think we understand so much but nobody
Speaks the secrets of brunch

We plan to meet at some cafe
As the sun pours off campus ivy
Onto the checkered tablecloths
The white plastic chairs

As usual I’ll be late
Pausing on the way to look at bangles and clogs
Babies nursing
Since babies came
And don’t stop
Some mothers even juggled one at each nipple

Or elderly ladies knitting on park benches
Hair going gray
Their needles insistently clacking

Or the deliveryman’s hardness
Thick sun-worn skin
Folded over the bones of his face

Wondering how you’ll tell me
To finally go screw myself
The businessmen phoning in from God-knows-where
The Botox-expressionless women leaving lipstick on glasses of rosé

I am separate from the girl who rubbed John Harvard’s peed-on shoe
And shouts over Tomorrow Never Knows for her roommate’s notice

Maybe I am half of this
A pair of dots for eyes
Gene for gene inside half my mother’s
Half my father’s
Beds of muscle
Hold me from splitting in two

Here where I dream the old body
Whole and abiding

I once knew a girl who ate brunch
In bookstores driving all the retailers mad
Leaving poppy seeds between the pages
Orange pulp on the immaculately varnished covers
Sometimes even poems in the margins

So here we are now hunched over
Those engraved commandments those endless altars
Of today’s menu
That landscape like a palimpsest of pancakes occupied with so many
Details of eggs and coffee
Smutted there so gracelessly

It is November and snowing
And the snow falls into the Charles
On the bridge lit by the white shadow of
The boathouse
A small woman wrapped in a blue puffer jacket
Lurches to the rail weeping

While I remember
The same girl passes professing the esteem
Of tears and reciting the phases of mitosis
Clearly translating to the long
Faint brunch boulevard no one talks about