None. No one is not connected to someone else in the city who was hurt that night or dead. It is
the no-degrees of separation or escape. Or times we’ve been borne to. Everyone knows someone 

who knew at least one in a city of millions. Open terraces under streetlamps and a fingernail of  moon. Tables of friends. A concert by The Eagles of Death Metal and autumn and blood and no 

breath and the young. The rifles and a will to end something. Paris, for lovers . . . I open my door to a man I’ve been calling all this week—to fix my door. Hamid, thin as a pencil, flaming as a showgirl. 

A face from the projects. A face from the once-upon-colonies. My lock no longer works. These are days when one thinks of closing doors. He stands in my hall, eyes like tunnels and sewers that bend  

under the city. Last Saturday there was a carnival bulging in those tunnels. People vowed to dance and to wear costumes and to live unless they die. I wore silk. Rented gowns, and feathers, and masks. 

You had to be invited. Steps, underneath our city. I wore red. Who are you, someone whispered in the dark. I don’t know, is anyone’s reply. . . I’m so sorry I have not answered you earlier in the week, Madame. 

My sister. The baby one. She is —, was one of— in the café. She came to the birthday for her lover. Her name was Djamila. I had photographed candles and flowers left for the murdered in front of that café, the day

after. I remember that name. Djamila, I tell him. His eyes are sewers, tunnels. He cries. I cry. Destiny, he mumbles so softly I am not sure I have heard. He pulls his satchel of tools into my hall to repair 

my door. There is a noise somewhere, that is too loud. We are strangers. He has come to fix my door. Holding one another, until it is over. No modifier, at all. 

                                             —for the Paris massacres, November 2015

This poem appears in My “Before the Drought,” from Glass Lyre Press/2017. The poem was a finalist for The Southern Humanities Review Auburn Witness Prize in 2016 and was first published in SHR in 2016.

MARGO BERDESHEVSKY, born in New York city, often writes and lives in Paris. Before The Drought, her newest collection, is from Glass Lyre Press, September 2017. (In an early version, it was finalist for the National Poetry Series.) Berdeshevsky is author as well of Between Soul & Stone, and But a Passage in Wilderness, (Sheep Meadow Press.) Her book of illustrated stories, Beautiful Soon Enough,  received the first Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Award for Fiction Collective Two (University of Alabama Press.) Other honors include the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America, a portfolio of her poems in the Aeolian Harp Anthology #1 (Glass Lyre Press,) the & Now Anthology of the Best of Innovative Writing, and numerous Pushcart Prize nominations. Her works appear in the American journals: Poetry International, New Letters, Kenyon Review, Plume, The Collagist, Tupelo Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Southern Humanities Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, The American Journal of Poetry, & Jacar Press—One, among many others. In Europe her works have been seen in The Poetry Review (UK) The Wolf, Europe, Siècle 21, & Confluences Poétiques. A multi genre novel, Vagrant, and a hybrid of poems, Square Black Key, wait at the gate. She may be found reading from her books in London, Paris, New York City, or somewhere new in the world. Her Letters from Paris may be found in Poetry International, here.