i.
The songstress opens her mouth. She is petite, a china doll.
Her mouth, song is Shanghai, 1920.
 
I close a semi-gloved left hand to my heart.
Shanghai, Shanghai; Mandarin, I do not speak, but know the soul of.

She opens her eyes while lilting.  Makes dark-lashed woman lids at me, not at the lonely drunks near me, nor at anyone else in the loud jazz house.
My windows are open; I know her heartbeat. She closes her painted eyes, sways to her own young voice and the piano.
She raises her eyes elsewhere in the room, at other men at various tables. The back of their heads gaze back. Her fingers clutch and twist a strip of fraying microphone cable tightly. She sways her hips when she remembers to.
Her vowels and tonals are off at times, but nobody else knows the ebbing and flowing of Chinese in the room, only the exoticism of her voice.

If I were single, I would rise from where I am eating up her vulnerability. I'd leave my scotch on the oaken steps. I would saunter over, tell her, "I love your singing. Let me buy you a drink." She is twenty-four, and I am twenty-one; this is no matter. A girl is a girl.