Two by Kate Bowers, After Karen Lillis

Boutique La Passerelle—“This Place Has Pockets!”
 
for Adele M.—December 1, 2024
  
Where else would you find yourself on a Tuesday,
hands jammed into the sides of your jacket,
looking up at the girls in the window on Wood Street
who can’t speak, being dumb as it were, faceless too,
but oh what they have to say
about that Renuar sweater and Foil dress,
all that European leather slung
into bags and scarves to tie on same.
 
Wouldn’t Street is a better name, they infer.
 
“Wouldn’t you like to see this in your size?”
“Wouldn’t you like to feel the hand of this fabric?”
“Blue is your colour you know.”
“P.S. We have pockets.”
 
At last.
 
Pockets.
 
A veritable warehouse for sheathing small secrets
incubated from eyes below the catwalk, say like
sliding in the tags you tear off in your closet
each time your Significant One—your So, So, SO---
asks  if that’s a new dress, and you say
“Oh, it’s been in here for awhile.”
 
The pockets of passerelle are home base
for the j.v. basketball squad, you know,
growing pains along into senior players
big time ready for a full court press,
smooth with the pocket pass,
effective as all get out
against those who insist on taking the ball.
 
You can carry your own ball, holster your intel,
Baking it up until it’s full and golden, buttered,
Impossible not to swallow
with a swish of the net, yet still rolling along the key,
moving out of reach but not quite,
still in pocket play
 
The caves in the heart follow us along every step,
reminding us of all we carry,
but oh, to have some extra room
in the sides of a skirt or a dress, that puffer jacket,
and oh look, even on the inside of the hem
on that silk scrunchie that just came in.
 
Imagine unloading your baggage
to those spaces, liminal silos of silk and linen
to be winnowed later for wheat
and the breadbasket reciprocal.
 
And it comes in blue.
 
And you know that’s your colour.
​

Fuchsia is the Colour of the Sun
 
--in memory of Adele Morelli, September 21, 2024
 
Pack up the Moon now we must, knowing you have gone. 
 
It’s a partially cloudy Wednesday when I hear the news from our friend Lynn,
two days after you were rushed through the streets of Lisbon, your heart beating until it didn’t. 
 
I close my phone, turning to see the rain pour into Pittsburgh—this city of yours,
emptied of your footsteps—and I bark out a laugh.
 
        “Grief is a puddle, after all,” I say
 
Soaked with the news you have vanished—poof!—like a magic trick one of those
old Shriners would do for kids at the holiday parades.
 
You never missed one.
 
 
The Downtown Partnership knew you would be there,
the girls in your shop window outfitted for the occasion,
 yet eclipsed by your sheer delight in it all.
 
I look into my closet,
 
and like hundreds of others you have left here
begin to dress so carefully this morning in fashions you’ve brought us,
wanting to be pieces of walking art,
a gallery for you pacing these streets,
cracking shuttered windows when we find we can lift our arms,
open our hands again. 
 
Soon we’ll begin to turn out our pockets over and over
              looking for the sun of you,
                                                         the colour you brought,
              the wild fuchsia growing along the mountain roads,
those azulejo tiles you wore in your ears,
                                                                               that rooster on the corner that never stops crowing,
wanting the sound of you,
                          your laugh,
                                                       that reassurance it will fit,
                                                                                               that the hand to this fabric, this life,
                                                       is yet still so worth wearing,
 
even as we keep muttering to ourselves 
 
         “But she was just here.”
 
Three days from now I will tell our friend Lynn that I’m going to pretend you’ve retired to Italy.
You’ve always wanted to, spending so many visits there with relatives
after your buying trips to Paris and Milan, walking to the Strip District
here at home to practice your Italian with expats,
                            studying,
                                                     saving,
                                                                             wishing. 
 
    “That way,” I will say to Lynn, “I can just wait for her next new arrival.”
 
The girls in your shop window will seem to agree,
keeping their silent, unblinking watch—cinched and perpetually ready for your return--
under the new sign scotch taped to the glass--
 
              “Boutique La Passerelle is closed until further notice.”
 
Two weeks from now we will see another new sign while the girls shrink back,
defrocked, and as bared as our gaze --
 
                                                “Boutique La Passerelle has now closed”    
 
 
And we who are left will make a silent pact amongst ourselves
to keep one button undone at the base of our throats,
              choking over the voice we can no longer hear but remember so well,
                           will wipe the rain from our faces,
                                                    will pull your scarves closer around our shoulders,
will recount your name to warm one another
when we meet by chance on Wood Street under that window
 
            —“Adele.”
 
Lynn will write back, sending me just an emoji with one tear.
 
She will write to us all--
 
            “Now she’s part of everything.”
 
Kate Bowers

Kate Bowers (she/her) is a a Pittsburgh-based writer who has been published in Sheila-Na-Gig, Rue Scribe, The Ekphrastic Review, and MacQueen’s Quinterly. Her work appears also in the anthology Pandemic Evolution: Poets Respond to the Art of Matthew Wolfe, by Hayley Haugen (Editor) and Matthew Wolfe (Artist) and will appear also in the forthcoming anthology The Gulf Tower Forecasts Rain to be published in 2025 by Main Street Rag. Kate is an alumna of Tupelo Press’s 30/30 Project and serves as a volunteer social media team member for The Ekphrastic Review.

Karen Lillis is a Pittsburgh based artist, writer, and bookseller. Her photographs have appeared in books by Night Ballet Press, Six Gallery Press, Ugly Duckling Presse, and Ventana Press, and in publications such as the Austin-American Statesman, The Austin Chronicle, The Heavy Contortionists, and Keyhole Magazine. She’s worked as a performance photographer, a portrait photographer, and a rare book photographer. In 2023 she launched a line of photographic postcards. She is the author of four novellas, including Watch the Doors as They Close (Spuyten Duyvil, 2012), and recently published her first book of photography, Pittsburgh When I'm Hungry (Karen's Book Row, 2024). 
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