Musky Honeysuckle

Richard Boada

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We needed a place to stay for the night and a ride from the pizza place that was closing. There were no taxis, and we didn’t have a map of this quiet town. We could see the Seine and smell wet grass and flowers and we were falling for each other as graduate students do in France. The bartender seemed angry at me but was so charmed by the young American girl that he gave us a ride in a very small van with no seats in back. We found a little hotel and stayed up in the room smoking cigarettes in bed and talking about Prévert’s “Breakfast.” We were so modern and cool. Earlier that afternoon, she found honeysuckle off a path around the lily pad garden, and she peeled away the tissue to release the musky honey from its core. These are French and in Mississippi hers are sweeter, she says, and I’m beginning to believe that she is meant to be in my life forever, but I’m engaged. Later, we sit in a garden off a road heading back to town where the World War monuments mix with those for the expats who once fell in love in this country, too. At night, the memory that haunts me is the one of her dancing on the Metro after some drinks at Café de Flore and I would join her to kiss her so she would stop her motion. She could embrace the estrangement while I tried to blend in. I regret not leaning into this lust and staying there until now.

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Richard Boada is author of three poetry collections: We Find Each Other in the Darkness (Texas Review Press), The Error of Nostalgia (Texas Review Press), and Archipelago Sinking (Finishing Line Press). He has been a finalist for the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Book Prize and is a recipient of a Mississippi Arts Commission Poetry Fellowship. His poems appear in the Southern Poetry Anthology, Urban Voices: 51 Poets / 51 Poems, Crab Orchard Review, RHINO, Poetry East, and North American Review among others. He teaches for the West Virginia Wesleyan College Low Residency MFA Program and Lane College.

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