Lagniappe
Her favorite number is a baker’s dozen,
called, in New Orleans and Baton Rouge,
a lagniappe, that something extra, something
special, a prize for showing up, saying please,
forking over a few bucks and change. Her favorite feeling
is heat cast by a bag of fresh bagels, warming
her arms as she braces it
against her ample body. Her favorite cashier
works at Third Street Bagel, the shy girl who asks
after her dog. She hasn’t the heart
to admit he died three weeks ago, so she’s foregone
bagels, cream cheese, small talk. Strawberry jam is fine
she tells herself, on wheat or rye or maybe a soft-boiled egg
with toast cut into strips, little soldiers
her mother used to say, bringing her breakfast tray
while she recuperated from measles. She turned seven
during her favorite year, home from school
for most of February. When she returned,
all the other students knew how to borrow
from 10 or 100. She never mastered
subtraction, still counts down on her fingers. But multiplication
she loves, reciting to herself on long walks, twelve times
twelve is one hundred forty-four, twelve times eleven
equals one hundred twenty-one. Twelves
seemed so exotic in third grade
when the numbered understandable world ended with ten—ten
times ten is one hundred, ten times nine is ninety—
recitation like music, her favorite song
the one her mother sang in French, Frère Jacques,
Frère Jacques, dormez vous. How strange that her mother could sing
words she didn’t understand, and yet she understood the song
meant time to sleep. Time to sleep, her favorite time
each evening, sleep little brother, little baker,
little buried dog. Her little life,
some would insist, but still filled
with one favorite frill after another.
Lynn Domina is the author of three collections of poetry, Inland Sea, Corporal Works, and Framed in Silence, and the editor of a collection of essays, Poets on the Psalms. Her more recent work appears or is
forthcoming in Ninth Letter, The Gettysburg Review, the museum of americana, About Place, and other periodicals. She is the creative writing editor of The Other Journal and currently lives in Marquette, Michigan, along the beautiful shore of Lake Superior.