A room lined with books and old theater seats, a velvet curtain, the red cabaret with the candles and kitsch. Of leaving that city. Sometimes a cruise ship is waiting, docked off the Place de Quelque Chose que J’ai Jamais Vu. This is wrong. I’ve said something wrong. It has been raining, or it’s about to, and a plane takes off overhead. There is always a patchy blue sky looking like its reflection on water, and when leaving anywhere, there is always one more thing to put right. Always leave a reason to come back. Reason will come back, but just now I am running through a garden on my way to the boat—or is it Père Lachaise? I cannot tell in this light. Winding black and white streets I thought were in color, the bakeries, boulangeries, men standing at all the café counters, but no faces. Banter and bustling. Busses. Busses, but old ones, all the windows open. Blankets, papers and people float and dissolve behind me. Then there are church bells—des cloches, des églises. A carriage and bride at every next corner, steep hills and old friends who are not supposed to be here. Even I am not supposed to be here, but I’ve missed my train again. And trolley cars loll by. Maybe it’s these damned French linens.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 24, Issue 3.
Suzanne Allen is an awarded poet with poems published online and in print journals such as California Quarterly, Pearl, San Pedro River Review, Spillway, and Tears in the Fence, and in anthologies including Not a Muse (Haven Books), Strangers in Paris (Tightrope Books), Veils, Halos and Shackles (Kasva Press), and Villanelles (Everyman’s Library, Knopf). She holds an MFA from CSU, Long Beach and has two chapbooks: verisimilitude (Corrupt Press) and Little Threats (Picture Show Press.) Her first full-length collection, We Wash Our Hands (Write It! She Said) is a self-published pandemic memoir in poems.
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