You Asked

1.  The Stradivarius Sound Bank

In Northern Italy, the city of Cremona
has gone quiet. A musician stands
in the performance hall of the Museo del Violino,
playing a dying instrument — recording
glittering scales and arpeggios before
the wood becomes too fragile, unplayable,
and the violin goes silent. The microphones
so sensitive they might pick up cars on the street,
clinking cups and frothing milk at the café
next door. Soon, the violin will sit in a glass box.
Visitors will press a green button to hear the recording.
All day, the speaker will cycle through short clips,
and the violin will sit as it is — the strings gradually
loosening, an imperfect memory of its last tuning.

2. Mission Dolores

We sit in the park overlooking the city.
The yellow quilted blanket taken from the trunk
of my car, spread out to hold a dish of almonds,
pastries with fresh fruit from the good bakery.
Below, a child’s birthday party — the breeze
flickering candles on the cake. Everything 
shimmers: the city, ocean beyond,
glitter on the cheek of some old hippie.
You take pictures with your phone,
fill a couple plastic cups with pinot. Once,
you asked how I wanted to be remembered,
and I held up a spoon to show my reflection
turned backwards, upside down. Until then,
I’ll take what I can: a little cream, half a strawberry.

ξ

Jim Whiteside is the author of a chapbook, Writing Your Name on the Glass (Bull City Press, 2019) and is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. His recent poems have appeared in The New York Times, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Best New Poets 2020, and Boston Review, among others. Originally from Cookeville, Tennessee, he holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and lives in Brooklyn, New York.