WANDA WATERMAN - CLOUDS OF PARIS

Wanda Waterman is a Canadian poet, blogger, spoken word artist, cultural journalist, and digital nomad. Her poems and articles have been published in Descant, Skylight, The Talking Leaves, Our Times, Tigertail, Pandora's Box, and Pottersfield Portfolio, Coastal Life, The New Internationalist, and This Magazine. She's performed her poems at 100,000 Poets For Change  and Nuit Blanche in Montreal. She was born in Maine, grew up in Nova Scotia, and now calls Montreal home. She's temporarily residing in Tunisia where she's working on a book-length series of prose poems inspired by the peoples of North Africa.

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                        Clouds of Paris
 
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I'm passing through the cloud columns on my way to you. They’re close enough to be cotton-candy real, not so close as to be mist, and they gather around me like angels, their towering figures dancing as gently as foam on a wave.
 
Look down: Paris is a massive circuit board— the dancing cloud angels look down and laugh.
 
When we speak French I forget that you’re Arab and I’m Anglo, because together you and I are always French— it’s how our not-French friends all see us. It was in a broken French that you and I met and forged une sympathie, in broken French both lost our heads (ce beau folie).
 
We should be laughing with these angels, laughing at the circuit board that gave us broken French, laughing at Marois, laughing, floating in the sky: Hahaha— we stole your tongue, celestial city, hijacked it for our love, our art, and took it down our own sweet road. Like the gypsies you lock out, we are beautiful and so beautifully utter broken the sounds you crafted, laughing and dancing with angels.