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Giovanni

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between

the notes and curl my back to loneliness.

— Maya Angelou

From my rooftop, I can see all of Paris from Sacré Coeur to Notre Dame, the streets carving

canyons through masses of stone forming a thousand triangles, a vast accumulation of triangles each

one unequal to the next. This afternoon the dome of St-Louis-des-Invalides gleamed like the aureole

of a fiery sun. Over the Seine, the smoke of the barge boats hung over the river, barely moving in

the stifling air. On warm August nights like this, time stands still. Yvonne doesn't answer her phone.

For two weeks I’ve searched for her. Each day, I’ve waited in the rain outside the National Library.

But she never came.

Songquan Deng

While we were dancing, Ernesto took the Spanish girl away. I looked for Yvonne. I

couldn’t find her anywhere. I walked up the hill into the trees. She wasn’t there.

I stumbled over the curb, hit the paving stones and split my lip. Blood was everywhere.

Les found me on the pavers.

“Man you’re one bloody mess. Let’s get some ice for that lip.”

He took me into the restaurant kitchen and made an ice pack for my lip. “How you

gonna play a trumpet with a lip like that? Man…. I declare, you’ve been hoodooed and

voodooed by that Spanish gal.”

I don’t think Yvonne is coming back. I’ve been walking around in a dense fog all week.

When you find a beautiful woman like Yvonne and then lose her by drinking too much, you

want to kill yourself. I take long walks in the Luxembourg Gardens and sit for hours by the

Fontaine des Médicis listening to the music of the fountain.

Bellena

I’ve not felt such loneliness since I was eighteen. Coming from a town in Italy, the big city

was a shock. When I arrived in New York, I was lost in the hordes of stony-faced people, rumbling

subway trains, gangs, and garbage in the street. To a lonely kid, New York can be cold. Some days I

thought I’d made a mistake. All I could think about was getting back to Italy. I thought the despair of

my first year in the city couldn’t be equaled. But I was wrong.

Paris has been a revelation for me—the powerful feeling I get when people respond to my

music the way Parisians do. I’ve fallen in love with every corner of the city. But today walking

through the city it looked grey, a forbidding place. Without Yvonne, I’m lost. I sit at the corner café

for hours, my composition book open, smoking cigarette after cigarette unable to write a single note.

My page is as blank in the evening as it was in the morning. But I stay for hours, dreading to face my

empty room.

Michael Bednarek

The air in my room is so heavy I can’t breathe. All day I just lie there looking at the

water-stains on the ceiling, listening to the endless dripping of the bathroom sink, thinking of

her. I’d showered an hour before, but my body is already bathed in sweat. I’m thinking of a

hot August day long ago, playing with Paola in the loft of a barn, jumping on top of each other

wrestling in the hay. Paola was the first girl I’d loved and I believed she would be the last.

Even though I lost her when still a kid, I kept Paola’s school portrait in my wallet for

many years. It was my way of keeping my memories of her alive. Last year after playing a

gig in Greenwich Village, a man with a knife jumped me from behind. He held the blade

against my throat and said, “I’ll kill you if you make a move.” He took my wallet from my

jacket. I didn’t mind the $100 I lost but losing Paola’s photo was a blow. I had never dreamed

I would lose her photo at knife point. Other than my memories, it was the only thing I

possessed of her. I’d admired dark-eyed Paola from the first moment I laid eyes on her when

she’d come up from Calabria. She had such grace, the curve of her neck, the way she

gamboled across the meadow. I could not imagine another being so beautiful. That August

day was the first time she had dared to steal away from home, riding her bicycle five

kilometers to meet me in the barn.

After a time, we became quiet and lay in the hay side by side while she told me why

her papa had to flee Calabria. His brother in San Luca had run afoul of the ‘Ndrangheta, an

organization of crime families that terrorized everyone in Calabria. In the last century they

were called ‘picciotteria, onorata società meaning “honorable society” which dealt in the

honorable activities of racketeering, fraud, money laundering, and trafficking of weapons,

cocaine, and heroin. It was organized on a strict hierarchy based on blood relations, all in the

family. You were born into the Ndrangheta. That’s why the government can’t penetrate it.

There’s a code of silence, omerta. If you break,it you die. Sons of ‘ndranghetisti followed in

their father’s path. When you were still a kid you swore on the Bible your allegiance to the

capos. As an adolescent, you were taught to become giovani d’onore and as you grew older

you became uomini d’onore, “men of honor.” The foot soldiers, the executioners, are the

picciotti d’onore who do the bidding of the capos with blind obedience.

Marriages cement ties between families. It’s like feudal times when marriages were arranged to

bind a kingdom together. Though it didn’t stop a lot of killing over turf. Hundreds died in the gang

wars. After, the picciotti d’onore killed her uncle, her papa fled to the north to work as a laborer in a

vineyard. Worried that the executioners would find them in Viterbo, her papa sent her mama to live

with her family in Apulia. Paola stayed with her papa because the school was good. He wanted her to

have a good education so that she wouldn’t have to struggle like her papa.

The barn was so quiet, so peaceful, it was like being in church when no one else was there, just

Paola and me. Every time her fingers touched mine in the heat of that summer day, I was inflamed by

feelings I’d never known. Suddenly she rolled against me and I pulled off my clothes, slipped her

faded dress up over her thin body, and threw it off over her head. She turned over and caught my head

upside down compressing my neck between her knees and I kissed the damp skin between her legs.

She rose up once more, her long hair falling over my face dazzling me with the perfume of her

shampooed hair.

Pinterest

My chapped lips found the ivory-sleek skin of her neck as she twisted away and rolled over

on me, her lips searching for my mouth. As the delicate flesh of her lips enveloped mine, she

expelled her warm breath into my mouth and I sank back into the hay, my fingers gliding over the

hollow of her back and down her narrow hips. My mouth against hers, I surrendered to my dream,

her slight weight upon me, the rhythm of her breathing fading away as we lay still in the dark

womb of the hay, our arms and legs entwined, our hearts beating in the silence of that steamy day.

My cut lip is improving. I got my trumpet and went up on the roof top. As the rose-colored

dawn rose over the city, I played in the silent light, muting my trumpet—playing a song for Paola

and a song for Yvonne, creating a melody for one and then the other until at last my pain fell away.

St-Louis-des-Invalides - Timo Elliott

Poetry is a perpetual struggle, life's very principle, the queen of unrest.

— Paul Eluard