Foundling Review

goes barefoot

with one pearl earring

the other has gone missing

she bites my frozen arm

with her chipped tooth

then dips her toes into

blue water lurching

over wet sandbags in

the dirty streets of

saint germain-des-pres

her toes painted a shade

called tomboy no more

look like red penny candy

and she won't give me

back my white oxford shirt

i went home to new york

to escape something but

the woman in my dream

points at the girls in their

summer dresses and is not

interested in my howls or

tears but bites the one apple

left in my backpack and hands me

a snowflake from her purse

she winks from the corner of

my room then pulls the door

shut and sings hey oh

Gary Percesepe is Associate Editor of BLIP Magazine (formerly Mississippi Review) and serves on the Board of Advisors for Fictionaut. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Salon, Mississippi Review, Antioch Review, Westchester Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, New Ohio Review, Fogged Clarity, Luna Park, Istanbul Literary Review, Pank, elimae, Wigleaf, Prick of the Spindle, Corium, Word Riot, Necessary Fiction, Blue Fifth Review, and other places. A former philosophy professor, he is the author of four books in philosophy including Future(s) of Philosophy: The Marginal Thinking of Jacques Derrida. He just completed his second novel, Leaving Telluride. His first novel, an epistolary novel written with Susan Tepper, is called What May Have Been: Letters of Jackson Pollock and Dori G, has been entered for a Pulitzer Prize in fiction

I don't know much about this poem except it did show up on my pillow one morning not long ago, and it was maybe the last dream I remember having--I haven't been sleeping long enough at night to have dreams. I showed this poem to some writer friends and one guy joked, "I want your dreams!" The sangbags in Paris are real, there's a girl that showed me her "tomboy no more" toes but not an inch more, and yes, I am a snowflake.