Olivia J. Kiers

The Portuguese Bar

The oldest among us has a tremor that becomes a toast 

of capillary waves breaking across red noses, 

punctuation marks and their inchoate grammar 

of polyglot surf and slurred wit, breaking 

as the bread passed in baskets overhead 

landing amid crumbs napkins spoons and stains. 

Bones in bacalhau: spines between soft lakes 

of ocean, as if salt could be snow 

and an urchin’s purple needle track tattoos 

across blue skin. Our current currency 

exchanges pearls for an oyster rock—let it be 

storied as a cobblestone whose fantastic nacre 

of midnight oil, grit and laughter belies 

the tectonic plate’s white rim rattling tines. 

Below our feasting table, more revelers hurry 

giggling down hospital-bright tunnels, 

littoral veins and arteries channeling tidal surge—

these are the transitory corners where mussels cling

in heavy groups, ice-blue and salt-hearted, singing 

gurgling and wet. Sometimes your head breaks 

the surface and you catch sight of a tower 

fizzing phosphorescence, vinho verde’s kiss 

malolactic, and the moon a moonstone on velvet 

skyglow between vestigial chimney pots. 

Behind the bar is a courtyard, where smokers work 

a midnight alchemy exchanging air for fire, 

embers harbor lights ringing across black water 

and we already well offshore, a long way back.