Summer Poetry Pop-Up: Katherine E. Young

Bar at the Folies-Bergère

It starts with the scent of lavender as she

buttons clean pantaloons, laces up stays,

smooths her bodice and shakes out the frills,

ties the black ribbon about her neck.

Her costume smells, as they all do: mingled

sweat and makeup, the fabric itself,

splashed, perhaps, with the licorice twist of absinthe.

Then come powder and rouge, the small earrings,

a pink and white corsage already starting

to droop. Her props are placed on view: beer bottles,

champagne, a vase containing two pale roses,

cut glass bowl of oranges that may

or may not indicate a certain kind

of availability. Leaning on

the marble bar, she doesn’t look at you

(Why should she look at you? Can you give her

what she needs, or even cab fare home?):

posing, perhaps, or perhaps beyond posing,

her face bleak, artificially rosy amid

the moon-pale globes and crystals shimmering

in the ersatz heaven of the cabaret.

Perhaps a man inspects her in the glass,

perhaps he’s looking past; neither of them

seems to see the woman on the trapeze,

feet squeezed into ankle boots of lizard green.

Later, she observes his red-gold lashes,

watches his still-young face slacken in sleep,

breathes in his scent of cigars, cheap brandy,

scent that clings to her fingers like orange

oil as she works her nails beneath the skin,

methodically stripping the pith to find

whatever’s left of the fruit’s sweet flesh.

-- Katherine E. Young

“Bar at the Folies-Bergère” was commissioned by the Washington Shakespeare Theatre as part of its Poets are Present residency.

Katherine E. Young is the author of Day of the Border Guards, 2014 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize finalist, and two chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Iowa Review, Subtropics, and many others. Young is also the translator of Two Poems by Inna Kabysh; her translations of Russian and Russophone authors have won prizes in international competitions and been published widely in the U.S. and abroad; several have been made into short films. Young is a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts translation fellow and currently serves as the inaugural Poet Laureate for Arlington, Virginia. http://katherine-young-poet.com/