A Parisian Fantasy
John Dutterer

           for Amy

Our lives filmed
In luminous black and white-
A team of cameras
Will catch us eating
A breakfast painted with grease.
We are ever
Happy and blasé
In our kitchen
Which is an outdoor café.
We will cancerless smoke
Nonstop tobaccos
Drinking coffee and wines
Tinted black.

I'll carry a revolver
(Autographed by Belmondo)
And your parasol
Will catch
The over-exposed sunlight
In that oh-so-perfect way.

A roamer and a waltzer,
We walk along
Any claustrophobic street
We will repeatedly kiss
Everyone we meet
And always, always
In an insincere way
Shake hands

And if, on a given day
You smoke a few packs less
I will fear
That you are ill.
Should you argue
Over decaying philosophies
With less conviction
Than before,
I'll take you back
To our apartment
(Which tends to seem
A bit too small
To anyone over
Five feet six)
And in the voluptuous black
Shadows across the couch
I'll lie beside you
As a record, lazy, spins
And ponder the meaning
Of existence
Until my anxiety makes
Me kick a chair
Until it breaks.
Then I'll kindly pour
A few stiff drinks more
Because it clears my head.

Throwing ourselves
Upon an unmade bed
Littered with magazines
We will make love
In carefully edited scenes
That reveal passion
But not flesh.

Darling,
Our true foe is place,
Not time.
In the morning
A dawn provided
By an offstage light
Will wake us
To Technicolor:
That least Parisian of towns,
Blue-collar Baltimore.

John Dutterer’s poems and stories have appeared in Pedigree, Radiant Turnstile, Argestes, Pure Francis, The Minnetonka Review, and other journals. He lives in suburban Maryland with his wife and sons.

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