Pia Taavila-Borsheim

Down the street, past the corner guitar man,
we turn left into the long arcade.
Its glass-topped ceiling dribbles with rain

as evening slows the clouds.
Shops line the walkway, small flags
draped at each bell-clapped door.

Here we find perfumes, stationery,
that silk tie you’ve wanted, or cinnamon
rolls at the baker’s, steaming up the window.

A constable sits his horse, clopping down
the cobbled lane. A child flits past, a clump
of ribbons streaming from her hand while

a gaggle of teens, furtive, smirks at us,
at our arm-in-arm gait, our middling
paunches. No matter. We amble on.

A wisp of curry scents the damp air
as you reach for me, your hands
in my hair, your lips on my cheek.

In the near-dark, we sixty-somethings
still grow breathless, still laugh out loud,
our voices startling the birds, who rise.

 

Pia Taavila-Borsheim‘s recent work has been published in or is forthcoming from The Adirondack Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, 32 Poems, ThreePenny Review, The Potomac Review, storySouth, The Southern Review, Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry, Barrow Street, The Broadkill Review and Ibbetson Street, among others. Her poems have also been included in such anthologies as Deaf Lit Extravaganza and The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry. Her collection, Moon on the Meadow: Collected Poems 1977 – 2007, was published by Gallaudet University Press in 2008, while a chapbook, Two Winters, was released by Finishing Line Press in 2011 . Notes to David was composed from 2011 – 2014, a portion of which was critiqued at this summer’s Sewanee Writers’ Conference by Claudia Emerson and B. H. Fairchild.