Bardot in St. Tropez
In the Bowery coffee shop a man sits
at the counter in crumpled captain’s hat,
sipping coffee from a worn mug, his straggly
beard the color of autumn leaves.
“Snow on the way,” remarks a man sitting next
looking out the window.
“Looks that way,” responds the man in captain’s hat,
who, out of blue, starts a story about his seafaring
days, about fighting off a gang of pirates off the coast
of Somalia, or was it Indian Ocean?
A twinkle rising in his sea-blue eyes he swears about
young beauties in Bora Bora, or was it Pago Pago,
who looked like Brigitte Bardot in her St. Tropez days.
“Times fly by,” he utters, when drifts in a young woman
in long tress.
Gently she shakes the snowflakes off her auburn hair
and plops down a pale plastic bag stuffed with crumpled
clothing as if she were leaving someone.
Calmly she sits on the stool at the end of the counter
and orders Café Espresso.
“Lovely as Bardot,” remarks the captain tipping the hat.
Perhaps too young to remember the actress, she breaks
into a smile like a wilted rose.
Snow is falling in earnest on the streets of Bowery.
Therese Young Kim studied English, French, and literature and worked as a Lufthansa ticket agent in Seoul before coming to America. She worked for 25 years as a professional interpreter/translator in NYC and elsewhere while pursuing the craft of writing. As a bilingual writer, her poems and stories have been published in Korean journals, and literary magazines: Rosebud, October Hill Magazine, Soundings East, Poetry Pacific, The Journal of Baha’i Studies, and Tuck Magazine. Her book in Korean, “천송이목련화 (A Thousand Magnolias),” has been published in Seoul. Her “Anna of Winter” was a semi-finalist for the 2026 American Short(er) Fiction Contest. She has now completed a novel in English, Nayoung’s Journey, literary fiction.
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