By Kathleen Loe
Featured Art: “Pat (she/they)” by Jemma Leigh Roe

Back to Mr. B’s with husband number three,
the low, bistro light releasing everyone’s week
into spicy seafood and high spirits. We’re parked
at the glossy mahogany bar getting lacquered,
two righteous triangles of gin biting
our lips and tongues with the urgency of teenagers
in the backseat of some dad’s Buick. We’ve come to love
the soigné bartender’s deft way
with our placemats—his glissando of ivory
linen atop the bar like piano keys
playing for supper—listen! A sizzling Satchmo riff
of barbecued shrimp, burnished
and golden with enough butter to get arrested.
Garlic sharp as Lenny Bruce, juices escaping
down the uneven highways of our faces,
seams deepened by the bad beats
and misses of the past, but here in the middle
of the delicious din of a full house
in the French Quarter on Friday night,
I can still feel . . . lucky. Have I been
finally dealt a royal flush or is it just the gin?
I want it to be him, this tender man, stealing
the last olive from his cocktail into mine, a small
almost silly kindness you could build a future on.
I’m all in, again.

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Kathleen Loe was born in Franklin, Louisiana, and received an MFA from Queens College of CUNY. She is currently living in Hudson, New York. She has taught poetry at the Hudson branch of The Writers Studio, and many workshops on the reciprocal influences of poetry and visual art. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in CALYX , Waxwing, Sugar House Review, Cagibi Lit, and Rise Up Review.