Oh the voices of women singing. I sit in churches and cry a dialect of relief. I look at a beautiful round grapefruit from a Danish grocery store. I want to bathe in its exuberant smell. I want to bathe in feeling. I snap the shards of peel and pith in half to release their fragrant oils. I scent my wrists and my hair. I feel awkward and American. I slurp my iced coffee. I look out the window and consider the word "undulate." I consider description and anger and sex. I gather my thoughts and my images. I gather my personal objects and leave.

Sometimes a poem is a walk and sometimes that walk is a series of images underscored by a grouping of words. For example: mounds, pleats, circles, and surfaces. Ideas keep me company as I walk. And by ideas I mean: flat boat, concept store, scaffold, material. I think about women wandering and reading in museum cafés. I think about cobalt blue and several different shades of orange. Clementine, tangerine, ochre, saffron, brick. I bite my nails as I shuffle through an art exhibition. I tear up when the beautiful blonde waiter asks, "Is everything alright?" I think about all the women and all their purses and all the lipsticks inside uniquely imprinted by their lips and the pressure of their hands.

I look at art and think of everyone I've ever known and loved, individually and all at once. For example, a print in a museum that hangs at the top of the stairs of my ex's parents' enormous Prospect Heights brownstone—they are aesthetes and intellectuals. I begin to cry before it. I think a lot about crying, but also bleeding, screaming, laughing. All manner of liquidity and porosity. Of becoming surface. That is to say, of ornamenting the interior, abandoning good sense. I drink train station coffees and hot chocolate made from a plastic pack of powder. I desire various other powders and creams. Gelatinous forms with rounded edges. Custards, cakes, marzipan, grassy hills from a distance, acrylic homewares, acetate. 

I apply blush in a café mirror and leave the excess behind on a napkin. I walk up and down stairs in my garish little red shoes. I see only the facades of famous cathedrals because I am too impatient to see their interiors. I think about writing poems about selvedge or liquidity. Instead, I list out the contents of my obnoxiously oversized tote bag. I ask the attendant at the trendy bookstore if they carry anything by Baudelaire and feel embarrassed. I sound nubile and slippery or, worse, a francophile. I clamber up to the top bunk of a hostel bed that has nothing on the sides to prevent me from tumbling down. I sleep well but rigidly, so as not to fall. I see more art and have more ideas: hot plate, ball pit, fake nail, office park water feature. 

I pass "SOLDES TEXTILES" written on the side of a building in faded transparency. The milky, chalky text gives way to the surface of the building. I pass buildings wrapped in plastic and netting and cloth—sometimes taut, sometimes draped, sometimes swooning, swathed, engorged. Yes, I want tall boots and loose, linen underwear. I crave the glamor of a heavily blushed cheek. 

I walk to the apartment where my grandmother lived after the war. I walk down Rue St. Antoine, passing the Places des Vosges and the home of Victor Hugo. I search for the ceramic building number that will signal my arrival. Reader, I feel the weight of history and the hopefulness of Paris. I stop at a bookstore and buy the Baudelaire. I pass by sumptuous displays of fruit. I think about how my grandmother remembers Paris aloud, how she proudly declares that she was the first of her friends here to have her own telephone. She always starts here, not in Poland or the camp or the train, but with the telephone that caused her Parisian friends envy. 

I reach a building with several terraces, set atop a convenience grocery store. I know that this is the one. I expect to feel something profound and I do. The curtains are slightly parted. People are living here. There are withered plants on the balcony of the third floor. I imagine her on this balcony—the left one, or maybe the center—talking on her telephone in several languages she no longer remembers. I glance across the street to see what she may have witnessed from this perch. I bear witness to my own memory and hers. I think about the faded pictures of this young girl. They are so small that you can cup them in your palm. She is impossibly small atop a miniature taxidermied bear. She is older and wears a dramatic dark purple lipstick. I turn in my garish little shoes and leave again. 

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Une famille à Bruxelles by Chantal Akerman