Vanilla comes from orchids
that bloom beside graves.
It comes from the Spanish for “little pod.”

The Aztecs named it tilxochitl, “little flower.”
It makes me feel like a little flower.
It is the second most expensive spice 

after saffron. I don’t care. 
I brought back ten pods from Vera Cruz.
Their fragrance anoints me with sweetness.

I peel them open, sniff them, 
get a little high.
They take away my pain.

I who have dreamed of flight —
drink from bottles of extract,
coat my throat with vanilla, 

that consoles me when I cry. 
Vanilla frees me from the past.
It has no expiration date.
                        

In the movie palace built as if Maharajahs 
rode their elephants through the fake gold doors,

ushers dressed in turbans bowed.
Saturday afternoons, I sat in the last row, 

my heart a shovel digging for love. On the screen, 
Greta Garbo and Melvin Douglas in Ninotchka. 

I became a mysterious flower with delicate petals, 
a seductive spy, reborn on the Champs-Elysée. 

In a black beret, my voice drunk with absinthe,
tenderness lingered like a Parisian evening.

When I close my eyes, I remember the girl, 
lonely as a bridge leading nowhere, 

for a few hours someone else 
in the darkened movie house.