At Café Commerce

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Two women—glossed and ageless—
perch at the bar like rare birds,
their laughter sharp, feathered with history.

They send back the wine, twice.
“Not enough oxygen,” one says,
swirling it like a potion she expects to bloom.

The bartender, wearied by elegance,
offers a glass on the house.

They share a single salad,
leaves wilting under vinaigrette,
fennel sliced with surgical precision.

Their faces—maps rewritten—
shine with the sheen of intervention.

They dissect their husbands’ deaths
with competitive similes.

“He had a lump the size of a baseball,”
the first woman says.

“Mine had lungs like seaweed,”
her friend replies,
spearing an asparagus with her fork.

“No, lumps,” she corrects herself,
as though the difference still mattered.

Nearby, silence takes a different form.
An elderly couple sits in quiet ceremony.

She—her skin leathered and creased
like a well-traveled handbag—
squints at her phone,
letters ballooned to billboard size.

Her hair cascades in teenage gloss,
a marvel of synthetic wonder.

He, in a trim jacket that remembers
when tailoring mattered,

barely sips his wine,
his gaze fixed on the door,
like he’s waiting for someone
he once knew to walk through.

They do not speak.
Their silence
says everything.

Not what was lost,
but what lingers—
like perfume on a scarf,
like fingerprints on the water glass
just before the waiter clears it away,
as they stare at the space
where something once was.

The table—
a white cloth bruised
by the slow blossoming of red wine.

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