spain

Creamy hazelnut spread
after a night of off-the-mark short stories
sitting in an uncomfortably warm bed
she applies a thick layer of lotion to her hands,
wipes the sweat from the crevasses below her eyes and beside her nose,
grabs her hair to push it back in a big mass,
"just one more time,"
listens to the bubbling throat clearing noises and occasional chirps from her small fan,
and finishes the last few lines of a poem she began that night
with a taste of hazelnut spread,
after a night of strange stories
in her uncomfortably warm bed,
and as she sat up
drumming away at the paper
like the lively samba beat
she never heard in the streets that night,
she remembered a dirty little corner
of a gum stained street next to a trash can
and the wall of an overpriced sandwich and
piaya restaurant far outside
the tourist section of the city
where the short attention span
of her feet would usually carry her.

There, in that corner,
was a rat.  Not a real rat
with sharp teeth and a long tail,
not the kind she liked to tease
people about to make them
jump up from their spines
momentarily
or at least off the edge of the curbs
that might be found on larger, safer
streets much closer to the center of town
then this one,
this rat was painted on the wall in
all black spray paint as if to
depict the shadow of what the
artist would expect to find there,
adjacent to such a long narrow street
that only connected to other, equally small,
not the kind of street she wore sandals on
for fear she would step on something,
a sandal looses its grip on the ground,
and the corner edge of her foot spends a split
second  lip-locked with the gutter water
in that street that would leave
a reminder of that ode de rotten egg
stench with her.  "A little trinket
to remember the city by,"
she thinks to herself.

Then, she says, almost out loud,
"I wish I had brought a camera."

She refrains and gives herself
a mental talking to with the following:

"You are sounding way too touristy. 
No wonder no one talks to you in Spanish."
You are in a small area of town and it's your one chance to escape
the mass tourism-
signs and menus in English, "Gaudi original" mugs,
and those cashiers who must think
you are too stupid to understand "un euro,"
so instead they tell you, "one y-u-r-oo-w"
and give you this look like if you don't
give them that euro in the next thirty seconds,
they will boot your butt to France and let them deal
with your "no-hablo-espanol' tourist ass. 

Still all she can think is-
"I was I had my f-ing camera man."

She puts her pen down, takes a look a the clock,
a blinking 1:30 and class at 9.  The chirping of her fan
sends her to sleep as soon as her pen hits the desk.