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      May 29, 2020No ProblemGeorge Bilgere

      I sit here aging at the streetside café,
      giving off the sickly yellow smoke of decay
      while people walk by pretending
      not to notice, glancing away
      into the distance or down at their phones,
      doing their best out of politeness or shock
      to ignore me sitting here aging,
      and I don’t blame them, it’s hard to watch.
       
      And now the waitress in her burning beauty,
      her lustrous incandescent womanhood,
      walks up to me in a radiant cloud of youth
      and asks if I want another iced latte macchiato.
       
      But I’m aging so fast, I’m racing so quickly
      through time I can barely hear her, and furthermore
      I know what she really wants to say is,
      your aging is kind of gross, kind of a turnoff,
      maybe you could go do it somewhere else
      where it doesn’t frighten the customers, and besides,
      it’s not like there’s anything I can do about it.
       
      And as I sit here with my skin peeling off
      and crumpling up like toilet paper
      and my hair falling out on the table
      and my teeth rotting and my bones
      turning to glass and all my organs drowning
      in the sludge of age, I croak to her
      as she floats in the cool creamy oasis
      of her youthful lustrousness, I do manage to croak, yeah,
      another iced latte macchiato would be great.
       
      And from 90 million light-years away,
      from the beautiful bountiful burning galaxy
      of her late teens, she says to the fast-decaying,
      maybe starting to smell bad, just about to be
      covered with flies old leathery carcass I’m becoming,
      No problem.
       
      Except that there is, actually,
      a problem.

      from #67 - Spring 2020

      George Bilgere

      “Every summer my wife and two little boys and I travel to Berlin, Germany, for three glorious months. In the mornings I wander down the shady little street we live on and sit with my notebook at an outdoor cafe improbably called Shlomo’s Coffee and Bagels. I order a coffee, open my notebook, and for the next two hours or so I sit there hoping a poem will find me. These are the happiest moments of my life, even when the poem I’m waiting for stands me up.”