by Kathleen Winter

Ghost of my face
on my face, specters
of my self on these
streets, turning corners
& corners & corners
& corners, striding
all wrong directions
away from the Parc
away from the Seine
stiff as a stone saint
looming in a stone
chapel of a stone
faith, refusing to bend
with the centuries.
Still poorly using
a paper map, poorly
creased, poorly
folded. Now, at last,
sitting. Staring left
at one leg of an ill-
fated pig, hoof
attached, clasped
by its slender ankle
in a steel ring,
immobilized,
to be sliced by
the deliberate
imperturbable waiter.
Not nearly far
enough away
from the action,
I watch
from a banquette
in this vintage
establishment
known far & wide,
quite over the sea,
where even as it is
here, time
is the butcher.

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Kathleen Winter is the author of Transformer, winner of the Hilary Tham prize; I will not kick my friends, winner of the Elixir Prize; and Nostalgia for the Criminal Past, winner of the Antivenom Prize. Her poems appear in The New Republic, New Statesman, Yale Review, Agni, Massachusetts Review, Cincinnati Review, and Poetry London. Her awards include the Poetry Society of America The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award, the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Prize, and the Ralph Johnston Fellowship.