By SHANE MORAN
Hiding at Stolly’s in the Marais,
I asked Sara, the Martinican bartender,
for a Cheap Blonde in English.
After a tap of glass on plastic, those six euros gone,
I watched the Rams and the Panthers
in the mirror cornered above the bar.
The man beside me was from Denmark,
and having heard my accent, his first words
were the Danes are under orders to shoot first.
His eyes seemed to reach out a hand asking
to arm wrestle. So, I shook it and gave him
my name. I showed him Virginia on a map.
Who here was the empire? My brown body
on that stool admiring the fingercoils
on Sara’s head and watching the playoffs?
Or was it Markus? ready to bite first at a bigger dog—
looking to play war in an expat dive,
neither of us having been to Greenland?
Shane Moran is a poet and writer. He was shortlisted for the 2025 Vallum Chapbook Award and is a recipient of an American Poets Prize. A graduate of William & Mary, he studies at NYU’s Low-Residency MFA Writers Workshop. He divides his time between Richmond, New York City, and Paris.
