Mrs. Fields® Forever

Melanie Alberts

March 1, 2022

"Look, if we can understand a fucking cowboy talking Texan, they can understand us talking Liverpool." —Paul McCartney, on A Hard Day’s Night being dubbed for American audiences. 

Our night job was baking cookies together, me a poetry major 

and you a bloke from an English town where everyone spoke

a lingo unintelligible to the village ten miles to the north.

I wanted to decipher you, too cute and cocky and of course

every girl in Boston would drop her knickers for, um, what?

What you said and what I grasped mixed like brownie dough

with beef chunks tossed in. Your banter exasperated my ear

dulling whatever love interest was whipped up during our shifts.

We worked well silently together, forming dozens of delicious 

circles because words are overbaked and underproved, crumble

into something you regret sharing as morning coats your tongue.

Writer and psychic artist Melanie Alberts works at the University of Texas at Austin. Her writing and artwork have or will appear in Drifting Sands, Sleet Magazine, Cold Moon Journal, Failed Haiku, Texas Poetry Assignment, Ransom Center Magazine, Just This, The Austin Chronicle, Borderlands, bottle rockets, and others. Follow Melanie on Instagram @clair.circles.spirit.art.