Café Morandi

by Anna Halberstadt

When I hear words love, God and prayer in one stanza
I feel like shooting myself
or the poetess
with her Long Island diner
chick-lit pale version
of sex-in-the city verve.
The next reader read poems about Rimbaud and Derrida
from a papyrus-like scroll
while twirling locks of her long hair
and making graceful gestures
with her white hands.
Then a French girl whispered her text
accompanied by two jazz players
on piano and a tuba.
It went like tree tree in the wind wind blowing
blowing blowing
but since she whispered in a low voice
in her soft French accent
and you could not get
at least 50 percent of the words
I thought it may have been language poetry
and it may have been beautiful
but evasive like a faint scent
of a peony in the spring.
The man with an intelligent face
delivered a long poem
about his father’s painful withering
and dying in the hospital
in great excruciating detail.
However, a diary of suffering
does not necessarily make
for great art
unless it’s been digested
and regurgitated like a worm
In a bird’s stomach
to feed its young.
The Russian reader
a stocky young man
who moonlights
playing Russian gangsters
in TV soap operas
blew me away with his low voice
and surrealist images
like his wife slaughtering a sheep
on the balcony of his apartment
on Avenue X in Brooklyn
so that Russians dancing to Hava Nagilla
at their son’s bar mitzvah
at a Brighton Beach night club
Rasputin
stopped in their tracks horrified
and the strip dancer
with a G-string
decorated by a gold leather Mogen Dovid
fell off the stage
killing the great-grandfather
of the bar mitzvah boy
with sixteen shiny
World War Two medals
on his double-breasted
blue pin-striped suit
made in Odessa atelier
in 1961, the year,
when he traveled to Moscow
to visit the VDNKh
Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy.