in the lesbian bar (inked onto the photograph)
is to the viewer’s left, but is not being played;
against the booth seatback, crenelated like a half-
shell circling the small table, two femmes laugh
up at two Germans standing, hoping to get laid.

I’m in a hallway of the museum. The photograph
is part of a Paris During the Occupation display.
What got me, at first, was how both women laugh
at the soldiers, ignorant (I think) to being played
(unlike the piano in the bar)—

and then the whole moment hit me with a delayed
reaction: we’ve seen the pie-charts and line-graphs
of what happens, but what happens after that laugh,
to them, to that piano, to the bar?