by Brian Kerstetter

 

 

MY FAVORITE BUTTER KNIFE

 

Yesterday was the hottest summer day in brooklyn

I put on a pair of white shorts

And took my racquets to the courts

For a set of tennis.

My outfit is modeled after bjorn borg’s

At the wimbledon final of 1977

I’ve never seen anything closer to perfection.

Wearing a white headband, knee socks

and old tennis shoes

I look just like borg, maybe better.

Then I lay in the grass

with a cold glass of lemonade

And let Godfrie the local bulldog lick the sweat

Off my wrist.

His sandpaper tongue took me back to …

…a girl I once knew in paris.

You won’t believe this

But I swear it happened.

On November 9, 1997

in the cafe where she worked

she was drinking and singing and

waiting tables in red high heel shoes.

After serving a plate of steak-frites to the next table

she climbed on the table

where I was sitting with her friend

and poured the lower half of a bottle

of that year’s beaujolais nouveau over my head,

she chased me out of the café and around the Pantheon with a butter knife.

Her eyes were on fire and

To this day she swears she would have killed me

If you’d caught up with me.

But I still think she was faking.

All I remember from that night was

the way the knife looked in the spotlights illuminating the Pantheon

and laughing so hard I had an asthma attack.

I told this story to O. in the back of a taxi last year,

“Shut up,” he said. “girls aren’t like that.”

and continued cleaning his camera lens with his t-shirt.