Tête-à-tête
What do you make of your first relationship?
Extremely pathetic.
How would you describe him?
A rogue but with a profession and a suitcase.
What did you learn from that experience?
That some men never grow beyond the teenage stage.
Was he handsome?
Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.
What made you love him?
A sheer absence of companionship.
Did he love you?
In a narcissistic capacity.
How did you get over him?
By living on another continent.
Any happy memories with him.
The birds we fed.
If he were still alive, what would you like to say to him?
I wouldn’t want to waste my breath.
COVID-19: Featureless
He speaks of the dusk of each muffled sentence,
the quarantine of an adjectival clause,
the numbing of a tantalizing subject,
the feverish heat of a muddled metaphor,
in a mummified tone.
I turn to see who is sitting behind me,
a featureless man with a knife and a fork,
contemplating his plate of chips and pork.
I think a zip for a mask of cotton
could be a designer’s profitable call
should COVID-19 continue to involve
such a vast expenditure of cloth.
The masquerades of high circles
displaying a wide variety of looks,
a gorgon’s,
a Joker’s,
a Nero’s,
now boasts a new addition to its host:
a circle with multiple horns.
COVID-19: Charades
I compare the global, infernal arena
to our own horrific, domestic scene
and wonder which is more disheartening,
the lack of amity between nations
or the death of the fraternal
on each familial mien!
I creep out of my inner bubble
for a waft of fresh breeze.
They no longer starve us,
it is suffocation by contagious fear,
since a single sneeze
can render one’s cordiality impotent
and each word one utters
is a threat to be seized.
Our scars are too deep,
pledging eternal visibility.
They have become the trend that the elect and elite
wear on their masques on public charades
to boast their solidarity with the afflicted
in their own aesthetic way.
He snored away
He had snored away his honeymoon,
laying the blame on his nightwear
which his best man had bought for him
as a wedding gift,
with the colors that sedated him most,
even stripes of turquoise alternating with cerulean blue.
He snored away the advent of his first baby Annabelle Ruth,
whose wailing at night kept him awake,
inducing a very sullen mood,
so large doses of sleeping pills
were his last resort
to weather that familial storm.
He snored away his amicable divorce,
which had loomed in his horizon for long.
His wife, who had filed for it,
supplied him with the necessary amount of booze
to alleviate the hard feelings that a separation induced,
lulling him to sleep after only one glass or two.
Dr Susie Gharib is a graduate of the University of Strathclyde with a Ph.D. on the work of D.H. Lawrence. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Green Hills Literary Lantern, A New Ulster, Crossways, The Curlew, The Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Ink Pantry, Mad Swirl, Miller’s Pond Poetry Magazine, and Down in the Dirt.
Susie’s first book (adapted for film), Classic Adaptations, includes Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
You can find more of Susie’s work here on Ink Pantry.