accented in gold

It's a two-poem day! This is because yesterday was so absolutely jam-packed that I wasn't at my computer at all. We moved from the airport hotel at LGA to the hotel we're staying at in Manhattan, went to brunch, went to look at cherry blossoms in Central Park, and went to see Wicked. (Which was wonderful! It was Lucy's first time seeing the stage play and I hadn't seen it in like 20 years.) Then we went back to the hotel and Lucy ordered take-out and crashed and I went to dinner with friends and then walked most of the way back to the hotel like an idiot who hasn't lived in New York in over a year and is paying for this with very sore feet and legs today.

Anyway, I kept thinking about this poem while we were walking through Central Park, so here's Ana Božičević for April 9:

Everyone shivering in their
Leather jackets
Eating sandwiches named after
Serial killers
And in the middle of
All of it
Magnolia trees
Enough to make you
Stop and say

Fuck!

Super tenderly.

—Ana Božičević, "Spring 2," published in the NY Tyrant, July 5, 2018.

*

Today's poem is also a little for New York, of course. I really love this poem, and it was always going to be one of the first ones I posted for this week:

for Erika

i ask you what's the first thing you think about
when you see the color yellow & like a real
new yorker, you say yellow cabs. not sunlight
or a yellow ribbon tied around a vase of fresh begonias.
yellow cabs honking down Broadway. i still remember
the night we first shared a cab. you whispered
honey, whispered lace, whispered chrysanthemum.
all that practice & it turns out, i had never ridden
in a cab the right way around us the streetlights blurred
into yellow ribbons, & when you put your hand
on my thigh it was like i knew for the first time
why god gave us thighs. why god gave us hands.
maybe god invented yellow for the cabs,
so the first time we touched like this
it could be accented in gold.

—José Olivarez, "Love Poem Beginning with a Yellow Cab," from Promises of Gold (Macmillan, 2023).