Wednesday, April 10, 2024: Rick Lupert's "At Night With Pizza" and "Paris is the Dream"

Los Angeles poet Rick Lupert created Poetry Super Highway ( poetrysuperhighway.com ) and hosted the Cobalt Cafe weekly reading for almost 21 years which has lived on as a Zoom series since 2020. He’s authored 28 collections of poetry, most recently It’s Spritz O’Clock Somewhere, and God Wrestler: a Poem for Every Torah Portion, and edited the anthologies A Poet’s Siddur, Ekphrastia Gone Wild, A Poet’s Haggadah, and The Night Goes on All Night. He writes a Jewish Poetry column for www.JewishJournal.com, and the daily web comic “Cat and Banana” with Brendan Constantine. He reads his poetry wherever they let him.

At Night With Pizza

Waiting for a table

at the place where

Margherita pizza

was invented.

A Meloncello Spritz

is in my veins and

we will dine-in unlike

the citizens in the takeout

line which goes up the street

to where the city is divided in half.

This could take a while so

I may need wine to continue the magic

and fall in love with whoever

brings it to us. A platonic love

like one has for food —

food that invokes memory

when it touches our tongues.

I may use the words tongue

and mouth in my travel poems

too much, but one thing’s for sure:

I’m not going to stop.

Paris Is the Dream

If you think you should try to fit all of Paris

into a single day you are right and wrong.

You are right because it is Paris and if you

only have one day you should spend every

minute of it awake and ingesting this city.

Wrong because you should have planned

on being in Paris much longer than this.

Paris is best done over the course of a lifetime.

You’ll need three years just for the river.

You’ll need to sell everything and replace

it all with Parisian things. Paris is what

you will eat and breathe going forward.

Paris is the source of all beautiful poems.

The guidebooks say a week will do it.

My guidebook says this is your life now.

That’s the dream, anyway.

© 2024 Rick Lupert