A repository of

lonely black instrument cases

a bottle of Chilean wine, uncorked

Musicians at their seats,

a cacophony of sounds

Karl moves to the podium,

his green Melodica at the ready –

and all become silent.

He tunes the clarinets, the saxes,

then all the other instruments.

“Don’t think it, feel it” he pronounces

and guides the musicians to play short notes,

slide ups and slide downs,

then executes on his Melodica

a Senegalese folk song,

a melody of successive, single notes.

Poet Ingrid Sertso injects words between

high notes, strings strumming

chicken shakes, bow movements and plucks.

She pronounces 8th – Avenue – Local – Night – Stop

like a syncopation.

The audience is listening intensely:

I am writing,

Another woman is painting on her tablet,

a video artist is recording the set,

All creating spontaneously

alongside the musicians.

Lola Koundakjian is a writer, editor and translator. She runs the Dead Armenian Poet’s Society, and the online Armenian Poetry Project. Her third collection “The Moon in the Cusp of my Hand” won the Minas and Kohar Tololyan Prize in Contemporary Literature.