Au Comptoir Turenne Toute Seule

by Suzanne Allen


Charity doesn’t message the man she tortures in her ways, drinks a glass of wine instead, big, and probably another. She’ll order a salad later, maybe even a dessert. This first of June is fairly young and bright and cold like March, and her horoscope says, It’s time to allow any unconventional visions to emerge and shine, and, This year will be different...

Children chase each other around the columns of Église Saint-Denys-du-Saint-Sacrement, and there goes another 96 bus to miss, so she can stay right here, freezing but not frozen, at last.

Charity didn’t come here to fall in love, never has, but she always does. It’s impossible for her not to. Always another bright smile to fall for, one more glass of Côtes du Rhône to fall into, one more step to fall off of, another chance to be seen, one more half-truth to be shown, like promises in stained glass and always the possibility of another moelleux with ice cream, specks of vanilla, too many points of flavor to ever regret.


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Suzanne Allen is a writing teacher and artist born and raised in the San Gabriel Valley near Los Angeles. She holds an MFA from California State University in Long Beach, where she still lives. In 2021, she published a full-length collection of mostly pandemic poems, We Wash Our Hands, and her collection of Paris poems, Awkward, was released in February, 2024. Others appear widely online and in print. The “Charity” sequence is part of a larger series of self-caricatures from her forthcoming collection, Attempts at Exhausting a Crush, to be released late spring, 2025.