Vienna’s royal Hapsburg heritage is honored in its clean swept boulevards
Stacked with birthday cake palaces and bronze fashioned fountains and
If the horses hadn’t been caste they’d still prance
As the H&M’d Viennese do between their 9-5s and ballroom cafes
Extending elegant pointing fingers to select
Pastries glistening beneath glass in a cloud of cafe culture
Dreamt up by the royal museum
of silver Hapsburg cutlery and kitchen ware
Too beautiful for eating
Empress Elisabeth, Sisi, if you please, leaves behind her jewels and hair pins
On velvet cushions plusher than the gowns she wore
Or her figure kept slender
By daily regimens and gender-role diplomacy—
The dimensions of her waist
Went down in
history
As the aspirations of a city to keep up appearances
Is drawn to anything that shimmers
And memorializes its artists once disowned
From beneath the Secessionist’s golden dome—
Vienna now curates the aesthetic of the Jewish beauty from Klimt’s gilded paintings
While a somber, paler tomb of marble books unread collects dust and complaints
For parking space wasted on history unclaimed—
A peripheral responsibility
To memorialize Austria’s Holocaust
Just kitty-corner from the Turkish market vendors
Who call out across culture clash and social class
To get a rise or a wince from the guest workers’ hosts
While selling dolmeh and making eyes at blonde daughters
Whose grandfathers no longer speak of wartime
But Ottoman and Hapsburg legacy battles on the border lands
Where Jewish heritage has been folded into the batter for a birthday cake to commemorate Viennese royalty, baked by brown hands adorned with bracelets of blue eyes
for good luck, and a beauty ideal out of reach.
CHID major making little things a big deal.
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