There Will Always be Paris
written by: Sherry Shahan
My darling~
I’m writing to you from a sidewalk café
Across from 74 rue Cardinale Lemoine.
Red wine. Baguette. Pencil shavings in the ashtray.
Mannequins sway on the sidewalk beside the café,
Happily headless in black strapless gowns.
I sip salty oysters; sharpen my pencil on pear-shaped shells.
“Paris est une fete. . . ”
Your prose polishes the handrail to our fourth-floor walk-up,
Above mannequins swaying shoeless.
1920s Paris, a keeper of fragile things.
Oh, how I loved you in the smoky dawn.
You polish prose and promises with mandarins in your pocket.
Lumps of coal sputter unvarnished sentences.
The baby carriage pierces the smoky dawn of Jardin du Senát.
You lure pigeons with a palm of corn; quickly snapping their necks.
Second-hand bookstalls line the quays of the Seine.
Unvarnished tales by Shakespeare, Brontë, Tolstoy.
I undress in their shadows.
Limp pigeons sway in the carriage with cornhusk books.
Books on the left bank bought for a few francs.
We crawl in and out of Anna Karenina’s sorrow.
I undress in her shadow.
Pigeons and chestnuts roasted in these lean years.
We’re entwined with a mandarin between us, so it won’t freeze,
Devouring true and terrible truths in unvarnished books.
Flesh searching for more than flesh.
Stripping pigeon bones and licking our satisfied fingers.
Your darling~
- There Will Always be Paris - January 14, 2025
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