Today I bought a French latte with my chocolate donut,
I drank it while studying a torn-up map of Paris I carry in my pocket,
folded and unfolded in wonder of what the French must be like,
seeking secrets about why their women never get fat.

The map, even after the many creases I gave to it, was webbed
under black roads and streets sewn together into a mesh of sorts.
I imagine French women drinking out of this mesh, coffee, I suppose,
poured from boiling Parisian skies, brewed, brown rain fills their cups,
scenting every pavement with whiffs of vanilla, swirls and swirls of crème
sieved by.

This intricate web of routes, this impenetrable knot-gone-wrong —
wrapping the city like bubble wrap, cushioning their masterpieces — Their conical
tower must be constructed out of a wired mosquito net, molded into
the handle of an underground fly swatter, or maybe it’s just the nose of dead old Pinocchio,
a decorated present tossed unwanted from a neighboring land, lit every night
in disguise.

Je t’aime Paris
dark with truffles and nibbles of bread, where all is measured
in sips of wine, where even the moon
is dipped like a cookie in French vanilla lattes.