Fiona Wright
　

The Driver

Oh, he can’t speak English
Mrs says when I ask for his name.
I wake to
his stiff sweeping, the white gravel garden
bared to the first sun. Loudhailers writhe
with morning prayers,
the taximen blessed
over the smokesong of their engines.
He pulls her aging BMW
through cowsome backstreets,
the corrugations of fences
barely squeezing past side mirrors,
Cliff Richard crooning through her tapedeck.
His questions fall soft, and askance.
The afternoon heat,
he busies in the garden, burning
rubbish, painting windowsills,
resetting shards of glass along the wall.
Sometimes, I see his gaze absent
through the slatted windows
of the main house,
where Mrs moves her dark outline
from kitchen, to table, to easy chair,
the ceiling fan
struggling at the waist-line frill
of her ossariya.
　

Crossing

First, the dust cross-pollinates.
Guards in saggy khaki scratch
their noses, phlegm-spit
before their stamps rubber
onto our watermarked papers.
The road is thick. Wads of paper money.
Laundry bags,
and swift exchanges,
the litter of planky rickshaws
and the speeding limbs of cobble-chested boys.
They drag past crates of cigarettes, munitions
and pickled pythons, their bulb-like elders
broadly beam and sweep their hands
at pink casinos.
Ribby women swagger under gemstones
and rub their tongues over their teeth:
Perhaps there is no law but human enterprise, the
thick illicit and a price for everything.

　
Fruit Market

Vast bald marrows, frilled mushrooms
make us marsupial. We scamper,
the greens hustling from the woodwork.
Wheeled baskets stalk. Their leathery muscle
snaps at careless ankles.
The whiplash of green bins, cornsilks
and macheted heads of cabbages, we duck
and weave our way, as the small teeth
of asparagus grate.
Knobbled and gossiping fingers
pull at thin bean strings. The backpacks
are bulbous, sometimes sprouting.
The crate-jawed men compere, their howls
reverberate and crash against the foliage:
one dollar one dollar cheapest
cheapest cheapest
try sweet lady, sweet sweet
sweet pear, try before you buy
The smell of fish curls on the edges.
We gather, alertly herbivorous
and chew on cherry tomatoes.
The seeds burst like blood in our mouths.

-three poems all previously published at Mascara Literary Review
　

747

I've heard that air hostesses
get paid cosmetic leave
if their skin becomes contentious
and the resulting pustuled pimples
can't be magically made over
with a blob of black eyeliner
into a beauty spot.
The march, pink-lipped, high-heeled, dry-cleaned
down the narrow aisles
and I can't help but think of a cloned army,
robotic, ice-maiden cold, and deadly
advancing behind their drink-cart artillery
ready to clobber any caught
smoking in the shoebox toilets.
Their incessant battle cry echoes and amplifies:
"Chicken or beef?"
"Chicken or beef?"
"Chicken or beef?"

-previously published at The Red Room Company