“I still recall the little whitewashed lodging where . . .” read by Cheryl Pappas
From the new edition of The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Aaron Poochigian.
I still recall the little whitewashed lodging where
we lived in peace, just off a major thoroughfare.
A plaster Pomona and an aging Queen of Love
concealed their naked bodies in our garden grove,
and the august and ruddy sun, at twilight, shone
kaleidoscopic colors through the windowpane.
He seemed a giant eye in the inquiring sky,
to watch us as we ate our long meals silently
and spread, across the worsted curtains and cut-rate
tablecloth, an effulgence fine as candlelight.
From The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Aaron Poochigian. Translation copyright © 2022 by Aaron Poochigian. Used by permission of Liveright Pu
Cheryl Pappas is an American writer living outside Boston. Her poetry has appeared in The Chattahoochee Review, HAD, and elsewhere. She is the author of the flash fiction collection The Clarity of Hunger, published by word west press (2021). Her website is www.cherylpappas.net.