Love Letter on Lombard Street | Audrey Lane
And of the many causes worthy of protest, it seems silly to choose
a botanical garden. But that is what we’ve done – refused to pay
the fee and decided, instead, to walk through this city that is
constantly bending uphill. We are sunburnt around our edges
from the boat ride in the San Francisco Bay. All five of us eat
ice cream for lunch and revel in well-worn jokes older than our
worry for aging parents or fraying marriages. In this sisterhood we
taste food with our whole bodies. We are stealing pieces of each other
to keep in our pockets, like warm sourdough bread that will sustain
us between reunions. At the corner of Lombard Street and Powell
someone shouts free nature! We stop in front of a riot of hot pink
confetti – paper petals like origami love letters climb the brick
building. We say bougainvillea too many times until we can’t stop
laughing, until tears are melting into our ice cream.
About the author:
Audrey Lane is an Austin-based writer who grew up in Dayton, Ohio. After earning degrees in English and environmental science from Davidson College, she pursued an MA in English from Middlebury’s Bread Loaf School of English and an MFA from Queens University. She is currently working on her first poetry collection.