-
One Week in the Village
- Callaloo
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 25, Number 2, Spring 2002
- p. 442
- 10.1353/cal.2002.0107
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Callaloo 25.2 (2002) 441
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William's Visit
Reetika Vazirani
He came like a slipknot his car
a dot beyond the plaza of cafés where
we sat Pennsylvania Avenue a coffeeshop
at G Street my-name-is don'tleaveme
a two week visa give me four I felt
about Paris the way I felt about him
what he would do to me six feet tall
eyes grinning white skin I am not
from here but what I'd give
I'm nineteen years terrible I'll-tell-
you-everything-in-an-hour
and I'm left churning if I were
but I kept hearing us laugh were
white as I dreamt we would past the District
Building sun setting balmy before rain
we wandered towards his car I mentioned
the weather why not take my arm till dark
pretend it's Paris June light until eleven o'clock
Reetika Vazirani is author of World Hotel and White Elephants. Her work has appeared in the 2000 Pushcart Prize anthology, Best American Poetry 2000, The Paris Review, TriQuarterly, and other periodical publications. For her essay "The Art of Breathing," (in How to Live with Yoga), she won the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award.
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