Inky Interview: Poet Hunter Boone

Hunter Boone has worked as an attorney and private investigator, and lives and works in Kalamazoo, MI. He now concentrates his work primarily on poetry and fiction. His work has appeared in Ink Pantry, The Opiate Magazine, Rougarou, Projected Letters, Former People, West Trade Review and others. When he is not writing he enjoys playing the piano and composing music on his Yamaha P-125 keyboard.

Tell us about your debut poetry collection, Breakfast With Unicorns

Breakfast With Unicorns is a quintessential amalgam that showcases my best work over the past thirty years. Its subject matter includes poems of loss and longing, rejection and sorrow and I think its theme (if there is a theme to it) is one that invites the reader to confront our existential predicament – the predicament of being human in a too frequently inhumane world, a world that we are thrown into, ready or not.

Could you share one of your poems and walk us through the idea and inspiration behind it?

Well, yes – for starters, who hasn’t had a crush at one time or another on a brilliant, seemingly unobtainable professor? Or maybe this is just my unique, self-inflicted penchant for suffering. At any rate, I think my poem, “Ms. Alligator” illustrates the kind of frustration and disillusionment that is often the result of an unrequited love or mis-matched affection:

Ms Alligator

She had the emotional presence of a toothpick,
the personality of a comatose eel . . .

A woman I desired
read Antigone
which she encouraged me to do, so I
did. When I came upon, “Teiresias,” I said,
“I can’t spell that,” she said,
“Look it up.” Somewhere.

She became that woman
you wouldn’t expect –
out of proportion
to everything else.

When she moved
her body slid –
of a piece – which caused a problem.
The ground upon which she walked
swayed and swelled
people running,
different directions
up and down the boulevard
while the other women – kinder,
nobler, gentler
with foreign accents
showed themselves open,
not nearly as dubious –
yet this one stuck
hardened within her molten core –
sad – yet oh so beautiful
in a glittering sort of way with

beckoning, surreal
blue tourmaline eyes
that rolled back into her head
as she spoke
incomprehensible

and inhuman things –
enticements thick with ice from
this sorry sophist and enigmatic soul
you couldn’t poke through
though I tried many times.

As the poem indicates, the woman who is the focus of the protagonist’s
affection is cold and indifferent, reptilian. And yes, like a comatose eel.

The use of metaphor and simile illustrate the harsh reality of what the protagonist has endured as the result of this encounter and leaves no doubt in the reader’s mind about the outcome; in the end the protagonist does not get the girl (or the reptile in this case).

The idea behind the poem is based on my personal experience of having gotten in “over my head” and fallen in love with my intellectual mentor, a professor who was at once beautiful yet unexpectedly cold. This is a modus operandi and course of action I do not recommend for anyone.

What’s your creative process?

My creative process often starts with a lyrical impulse, a phrase, or a poem title. The title or phrase typically comes out of an emotional experience or some intellectual matter that is yet unresolved within myself. I work out the poem as I write; it rarely comes, “full cloth.”

Tell us about your BA in Creative Writing.

I was extremely lucky (and there’s no other word besides “lucky” to describe it) to have had extraordinary mentors as an undergraduate. The most influential and helpful was Eve Shelnutt who was from South Carolina and taught for years at the College of the Holy Cross near Boston. She left me with many memorable lessons but her most valuable words, a kind of mantra I carry with me were:

“There’s nothing to replace a sense of integrity about one’s work.”

What are you reading at the moment?

I am currently reading the collected works of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

I do think it’s important for a poet to find both poets and fiction writers to contribute to the poet’s repertoire. Especially with a writer like Fitzgerald, whose prose is lyrically haunting and so beautifully fluid. There is much to learn from many of these other great prose writers: Hemingway, V.S. Naipaul, Michael Ondaatje, Thomas Mann to name a few.

Have you any advice for budding poets?

Don’t listen to your parents. The ones who ask you to pursue and study something “more practical.” It’s fine to be practical and get a double major – like in business and creative writing – but don’t let the creative writing take a back seat to anybody or anything if poetry or some other writing genre is your first love.

Who inspires you and why?

My current publisher and friend, Trystan Cotten, founder and Managing Editor of Transgress Press. Trystan is truly an innovator and trailblazer and probably the hardest working person I know. He manages to solicit and publish new work from authors all over the world, many of whom are from marginalized communities. He manages to do this while at the same time carrying a full teaching load at Cal State University – Stanislaus where he is a full professor. And just when he gives you the impression he is “all work and no play” you find out that he has just left for a four-day trip to Maui to go surfing or is in Chicago to go “high-step dancing” with his friends. Unbelievable. I find him inspiring because he never seems to let anything get him down and he really does have this relentless work ethic and the gift (or the ability) to have fun and thoroughly enjoy himself no matter what he is doing.

What’s next for you?

I am always writing poems and will continue to write poems because they are relentless in their pursuit of me. A concept or an idea or a particular feeling or image will come to me and stay with me until I write it out and try to turn it into art or at least a meaningful encounter with language.

Alongside poetry, I am also working on a novel that has been in the works for over a decade. I am not an expeditious prose writer – far more the tortoise and not the hare. The novel is loosely based on my experience of growing up in a small town with lots of quirky characters and unexpected turns of plot. I hope to have it finished by summer of 2023.

You can find more of Hunter’s work here on Ink Pantry.

Poetry Drawer: Longstack: At the Laundry: By the Meadow: June 2007 by Robert Demaree

Longstack

The only place it is a mountain is from our dock.
Driving around, I have seen it from other angles,
No more than undulations
In the New Hampshire landscape.
But across the pond it rises
Gently, right to left,
And runs asymmetrically along a ridge
Perhaps a mile,
Sloping down at last toward the big lake.
It is the remembered view
We carry home at the end of summer.
In my binoculars I can see
New A-frames in the high meadow
On the near slope.
I do not begrudge them their gated driveway,
Their view of the pond,
That they have taken up residence
In our field of vision,
Their binoculars trained, I suppose, on us.

At the Laundry

Summers I worked at the laundry,
Money for college. This was in the ’50s,
People still got polio then.
We washed the dingy garments of the shoe towns
(We still had them in New Hampshire then)
And the fine percale of folk
Down gated roads by the lake.
The girls who did the folding
(We called them girls then)
Would offer coarse jokes
About the bed sheets of the rich.
And I, caught, then as now,
Somewhere in the middle,
Passed wrenches to Neil, our boss,
As he straddled the ancient boiler,
Expert turnings of things we chose to think
Kept us from blowing up.
He nursed and finally lost a son to polio.
For forty years I went by his house
And we would recall the ones
Who ran the presses, fed the mangle.
The laundry is gone, of course,
Chiropractors and aromatherapists in its space;
Gone, too, is Neil, my gentle friend,
Who valued me in a fragile time,
On hot July afternoons,
Steamy with the innocent fragrance of
Starch, fresh linen, decent toil.

By the Meadow: June 2007

Betsy Winbourne, now eighty,
Rakes hay in the meadow at midday—
You would not do this a month from now;
Up from Boston, opening the cottage.
No sign of the Woodleys;
They say his tumour has come back,
His fields thick with timothy and clover,
In need of Seth to mow,
If one knew where Seth had gone.
I walk along the lane
Gathering the winter’s news:
Someone’s cellar flooded,
Someone’s well has failed,
Bears in the woods, taking out bird feeders.
And yet:
The young leaves, the greens, the light,
So various, so fresh with innocent hope:
It is early June in New Hampshire
And the world seems possible.

Robert Demaree is the author of four book-length collections of poems, including Other Ladders published in 2017 by Beech River Books. His poems have received first place in competitions sponsored by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire and the Burlington Writers Club. He is a retired school administrator with ties to North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. Bob’s poems have appeared in over 150 periodicals including Cold Mountain Review and Louisville Review.

You can find more of Robert’s work here on Ink Pantry.

Poetry Drawer: Atman. Atman.: On the Avenue: On Suffering by Robert Ronnow

Atman. Atman.

I have no clue what Krshna taught Arjuna
but I like the name Atman a lot.
Atman. Atman. Where a man is at.
At all times. No matter what.
Gita, get in the action, gorgeous girl,
God is the answer, keep the meter.

Wisdom, none.
What Krshna tells Arjuna makes no sense.
I prefer mathematics.
Knowledge of how things are made and done
more than meditation on the Self
as a manifestation of the One.

I’ll never have to leave this comfortable planet.
We have this asset but can we sell it?
In Paradise Lost, Satan executes his plan
but God already knows all about it.
Still, whether it succeeds or fails is up to Man.
Same here, when it comes to nuclear armaments,
a distraction from the work of making life permanent.

It is all premised on the mystery
of invisible but sentient particles—
little Krshnas and Kachinas
nesting inside one another.
Meanwhile life goes on outside all around you—
WWII, the Napoleonic wars,
the Civil War which we’re still fighting.

Krshna says behead your brothers
without prejudice or justice.
So it transpires in the nuclear fire.
Whatever forever.
Teacher, teacher—tiger!

On the Avenue

From marble and granite to steel and glass,
we were discussing Rhina Espaillat’s On the Avenue in class,
was it 1950s or 1980s NYC and were the fifties
the city’s halcyon days or is it now, the 2020s,
the boroughs teeming with immigrants
from the round earth’s imagined corners,
Hasidim and Muslim, Haitian and Russian, as we
Italians and Irish in an earlier era were. Everything will
be ok or not, the recombinations which make
prediction and intuition fortunately hopeless
and each individual an experiment gone well or wrong.
On the avenue God speaks by spewing
toy and clothing stores, breakdancers and ice skaters,
the Brooklyn Navy Yard seen from the Brooklyn Bridge,
the skyline admired when my car broke down on the Triborough Bridge.
The numbers of us overwhelm, there exist powers
overwhelming for the human body and mind.
I don’t mind but I can’t make sense of it.
Gandhi said What you do may not seem important
but it is very important that you do it. By that what is meant?
Linda said Why does God always have to be a man?
I said He could be a She but she’s probably really
a Tyrannosaurus rex. I like to be in America!

On Suffering

I waited too long
to biopsy my lung
yet lived long enough
however long is long.
Whatever. It’s not wrong
to count along
while busy living. Sing
and stay strong
absorb the sun’s photons
and store them in your bones.

Those bones
outlast slights and wrongs
are white as lightning and strong
as sticks and stones.
Inside is one’s
spirit, soul, the nameless one
the one that’s never known.
It has no cell phone
can’t communicate or even moan.
Therefore. Why complain?
Have some fun.

Soon
I’ll be undone
underground
my garden burned down.
So what. John Donne
died and so did Milton.
Emerson too, and Whitman.
Get over it. Vote. Love. When
the train comes in the station
whistle with it, wish on
stars with passion
or careful hesitation.
Anything’s fine, within reason.

Season by season
things get done.
Algebra and calculus, Malcolm X, George Washington.
No taxation
without representation.
A gun
in every den.
People will be governed
one way or another, by a king
or trusted friend. Corporation.
Men
are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable,
than to right themselves by abolishing the Evils to which they are accustomed.

I’m too young
to die! I cry. My generation
cannot outrun the sun
but I want to see what happens
next, a tsunami or tornado, rain
and wind beyond our comprehension
hit in the head by speeding debris, irony
of ironies! plastic contraptions,
rotting computers and yogurt cups,
pain in the baby! Moment’s
notice. None,
I notice,
live long
enough to see the end. A billion

years hence
human sense
has so modified and mutated under
some other sun
we share one mind
and everything’s remembered by everyone.
Look it up. There is no death, just perfect rest. A perfect tan
is possible, and work is fun.
I’m going there when I pass on
because souls will travel at warp speeds, using nuclear fission.
About suffering, religion
was right (and wrong) all along.

Robert Ronnow‘s most recent poetry collections are New & Selected Poems: 1975-2005 (Barnwood Press, 2007) and Communicating the Bird (Broken Publications, 2012).

Pantry Prose: A Deckchair on Southport Beach by Sally Shaw

The day it began; I was me. Mabel and I had fled the wages office of Tyrers department store, to the gardens in Palmer Square. We sat on the last vacant bench, amidst giggles, mid-conversations of folk out on a mid-summer’s lunchtime. Some were courting couples, office workers, and shop assistants, others, faded mothers chasing toddlers around pushchairs. The zing of mowed grass crashed with fumes of passing vehicles. I longed for a sea breeze and deckchair on Southport beach.

Mabel chattered away about her wedding plans, while I tugged a dog hair from my meat paste sandwich. I dragged my finger against the edge of the bench to hide the fur. Meat paste clogged the ridges of my palate, and I stretched another hair from my mouth, too long to be Albert’s. I glanced at Mabel’s ponytail.

“Are you not going to finish your sandwich? After I took the time to make it for you. Oh, did I mention my wedding will be in the grounds of Charles’s parents’ stately home in Cumbria?”

Mabel had finished her sandwich and sunk her teeth into a Vanilla slice. She held out a jam tart for me. I gagged on what remained of the bread and paste, swallowed hard, before I praised Mabel for making such a tasty sandwich. I took the tart. She continued to talk and talk enlightening me to how lucky Charles was that she had agreed to marry him. How he wasn’t the best-looking man, that, that wasn’t critical as he absolutely worshiped her. I responded in what I considered to be a polite way, by asking her a simple question.

“How come your Charles hasn’t been round ours to say hello?”

She’d been going on and on about Charles and the wedding since we met, on her first day in wages. That was a month ago. Within a week we had become best friends and flat mates, although I couldn’t recall agreeing to that.

Mable spat out the answer to my enquiry, her changed tone and menaced wide-eyed glare unnerved me. I felt I was the one in the wrong. She knew I hated being called Liz.

“Liz, really, why would I bring him around to meet you of all people.”

She sniggered while dabbing the sides of her upturned lips with a pink cotton napkin. My response, squashed by a battered self-worth. I retrieved the napkin she’d tossed onto the bench next to me and folded it before putting it into my handbag along with my pride.

“Oh, best be getting back, don’t want Miss Twist picking you up on your time keeping. Oh by the way, I’ve mentioned to Miss Twist you’ll do my late this Friday. Charles is whisking me away for a romantic weekend.”

“I can’t I’m…”

“You can, I’ve told your Jimmy you’re spending the weekend with your best friend, me!”

She puckered her matt red lips, pressed her little finger to the left corner of her mouth then clicked shut her compact. She took hold of my chin and told me I’d be pretty if I smiled more, before kissing my cheek. I smiled. We walked back to work, with no more said about Friday only the sound of Mable’s voice whittering on about how special she was, and that Charles knew he was lucky. She had me carry her handbag. I walked two steps behind her, as she strutted and laughed.

“I feel like the Queen with my lady in waiting.”

I couldn’t recall why I’m her friend. Betty from our office stopped to chat, Mable placed herself at the centre of the conversation and I wasn’t acknowledged by either of them. I felt myself sink to the bottom of my stomach like I was riding the front car of the rollercoaster at Southport Pleasure Land. I never returned from the pit of my stomach. Once Betty had gone Mable grabbed my hand.

“Come on, darling, we’re going to be late. Don’t you worry I’ll let Miss Twist know it was Betty’s fault.”

For the rest of that day, I was the most important person in her life in a strange unforgiving way.

I’m sat on a deckchair, on Southport beach. Sand swirls above the damp ridges formed by the tide, like fairies and elves dancing around my bare feet. I’ve shoved my knee length tights into my sensible shoes. I curl my toes down, halos form around them, dry sand rolls over pale skin. There’s a chill to the early October day, I wished I’d come in June, even though that wasn’t possible as she was still alive. I look for the sea, far away a murky greenish line forms a break in the skyline. I turn to my left and right, I’m alone. Tiny figures move up and down the pier a mile away. A drip forms on the tip of my nose. I consider wiping it on my coat sleeve but think it’s not what a sixty-five-year-old should do. I reach down grab my handbag, balance it on my knee, I pull out what I think is my handkerchief and pinch my nose. As I scrunch it up with my spindled fingers a wave of sickness hits me. The pink cotton napkin falls into my lap, I thought I’d thrown it out with the rest of her belongings. The wind catches hold of it, and it takes flight like a kite. A quote from Lauren Bacall pops into my head ‘Imagination is the highest kite that one can fly.’ The napkin descends landing like a shroud over my feet. In that moment of flight, it hit me, I rummage in my bag searching for a mirror. I pull out her compact and remember her giving it me at the end of that mid-summers day when I found her hair in my sandwich and she made me feel guilty. How have I not thrown these items; I must be going senile. I snap open the compact, a cloud of power puffs up and is lost in the sand. I hold the mirror up to check my nose is clean. A face stares back at me, I look behind me and back to the face, it’s still there. I hear a voice shouting.

“I’ve not been myself for forty-five years.”

The words echo like the distant sound of the ocean from a shell held to my ear as a child. Whiffs of salty-seaweed seep into my nostrils with each stuttered breath; brings me to my senses like a dose of smelling salts. I close my eyes and I’m sat at her bed side. Her matt red lips, faded by time and ill health. Her laced skinned left hand lies ringless and flat, dissolving into the white sheet. Her chest clicks as it rises and falls, like a young robin calling for its mother. The click is interrupted by a chilled silence of impending demise. I count the seconds to the next bird call. I’m up to fifteen, click, nothing, click. The silence crashes into my ears, I fill this gap and mute the clicks for help with the brevity of my voice.

Mable, I stopped liking you on the day you made ‘me’ fade. You started the process a month before, but I was too moulded to notice. I was so happy to have a best friend. I was never the popular one, never chosen by the netball captain, or for a last dance at the Town Hall. You brightened the wages department and picked me as your friend. You separated me out from my family like a sheep dog. I took your guilt and you were the shining light that everyone flew to, like moths. You collected moths, to take the pleasure of being wanted and the glory of winning. Mable, I’m quiet for a moment, until I hear the click. Mable, you stole me, you continuously had an answer for why you needed me to stay, if I left, you’d, well, you hinted I would be the one to find you. Charles, you said died in a boating accident. I never mentioned I saw you walking alone from my deckchair on Southport beach, that romantic weekend. Charles was killed a week later. Miss Twist fell down the stairs that lead to the shop floor. It was you who found her. I didn’t tell you I’d left my handbag in the staff restroom that evening and seen you with Miss Twist. You cried crocodile tears at the grave side of Miss Twist. Her family comforted you. A month after the funeral you became Wages Supervisor. I forgot who I was, if anyone asked, I’d say I’m Mabel’s friend.

I hear another click, I count, to a thousand. I have my wish of a deckchair on Southport beach.

Sally has an MA Creative Writing from the University of Leicester. She writes short stories and is currently working on her novel based in 1950s Liverpool. She sometimes writes poetry. She gains inspiration from old photographs, history, her own childhood memories, and is inspired by writers Sandra Cisneros, Deborah Morgan, Liz Berry and Emily Dickinson.

She has had short stories and poetry published in various online publications, including The Ink Pantry and AnotherNorth and in a ebook anthology ‘Tales from Garden Street’ (Comma Press Short Story Course book 2019).

Sally lives in the countryside with her partner, dog, and bantam.

You can find more of Sally’s work here on Ink Pantry.

Poetry Drawer: Night-time Memories: I Enjoy: Yesterdays of my Dreams: Untitled: Burning Tempo by James G. Piatt

Night-time Memories

My world, a dark blue in its
Vastness comes with aches
And pains and a cache of
Visions that echo in the
Ebony void, of its emptiness.
My music, filled with secrets
And stories couples me to
Winter’s wind as it ricochets
Off my nighttime memories.

I Enjoy

                 The sounds of waves continually rushing
onto a sandy shore bringing in stories from the deep
where man has no power to edit,

                The rays of the sun that never end, which
carry warm supplications in the ether high above
where man has no ability to censor.

                The chirping of colourful birds singing feathery
 arias high in the trees of a verdant forest where man 
has no capacity to tarnish.

Yesterdays of my Dreams

Like butterflies flitting in the breeze,
my mind is floating in the blueness
of a sky full of images, visions,
prayers, and forgotten truths, that
touch the quivering echoes of all the
yesterdays of my dreams.

Untitled

As our thoughts rise and fall on seldom trod paths,
The warbling of birds will cast new visions into
Our evolving memories.

As a rusted gate swings lazily on a copper hinged hasp
It solemnly warms us to loosen our emotional grasp
On those things that are dark, but ephemeral.

As thoughts swim up the river to a placid pond,
They go to a place where contented minds gaze,
and muse upon in the lazy hours of the day,

As things plague our mind, and arrive as if designed
by demons, we must understand that they are just
bits of unreality, and

As each new day leads us to greater happiness,
They will vanish into the darkened void where
All such gloomy things are quickly destroyed.

Burning Tempo

Another day
Like yesterday…
Red dust
Climbing
Into the earth,
The oceans,
And rivers dry,
Birds swaying
In the dry wind,
Ashes in
The hearth,
Don’t cry,
Don’t cry, it’s not
Over yet…
Pretend my friend.
Each day is a
Miracle,
Life is magical,
It’s a beat,
A pulse,
An echo.
Voices
Bounding off the
Heated land, by
Drum sticks used by
withered hands
Hidden inside
Leather:
Pretend my friend, …
Don’t cry,
Don’t cry.

James, a retired Professor and octogenarian is a Best of Web nominee and three time Pushcart nominee and has had five poetry books “The Silent Pond,” (2012), “Ancient Rhythms,” (2014), “LIGHT,” (2016),“Solace Between the Lines,” (2019), and Serenity (2022), over 1700 poems, five novels, seven essays, and 35 short stories published worldwide in over 255 publications. He earned his doctorate from BYU, and his BS and MA from California State Polytechnic University, SLO.

You can find more of James’ work here on Ink Pantry.

Poetry Drawer: Footsteps: Taking the Name: Cut Down to Size: Count the Days: Our Collapse by Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozabal

Footsteps

There was a knock on my door.
I heard footsteps walking as I
opened it. My heart skipped a beat.
I saw no one, only heard footsteps
walk and walking away. I counted
a thousand footsteps at least.
I am known to embellish things.
I fear the man I am turning into.
There was no shadow to those
footsteps. In the distance I thought
I saw a figure walking. It was just
a memory of someone I once knew.

Taking the Name

The skeleton’s skull
is suspended
in the night sky,
taking the name
moon; its bleached
white tears are
dispersed along
night’s canvas,
taking the name
stars. The black ink
is spread throughout,
which has already
been named sky.
Its hue will change
in the twenty-four
hours called day
with spheres lingering
in the sky with the names
of sun and planets
to keep our attention
and interest.

Cut Down to Size

O, I am not handy with a saw,
but I have cut into wood like
a woodcutter. I cut until my
hands hurt and my blisters
made me feel useful. I cut
under the shadows of tree
leaves. The cutting of limbs
was such a release. One day
someone might be cutting
on me. I am far from healthy.
I feel the pain in my knees.
I feel the torment of not being
able to do what I used to do.
I see my life racing by. I am
seeing a future where I will
need to slow down.

Count the Days

Here I count the days?
My time is going slow.
Between morning and noon,
between noon and five o’clock,
I feel a quiver some days.
The days are so long.
I search my soul so
deep. One of these days
I will lie under grass.

I am just here surviving.
Green pastures await me.
I will lie underneath.
Time is up for everyone.
There is no need to feel sad.
I do not always feel down.
I look forward to night
to watch the stars cluster.

Our Collapse

Our collapse is our own doing.
Greed inevitably consumes itself.
Man has sold its soul for riches.
This negligence will come due.
Like a wilted flower, we will perish
someday someway at any hour.
I will be among the protesters
kicking up the dust I will become.

Luis lives in California and works in the mental health field in Los Angeles. His poems have appeared in Blue Collar Review, Ink Pantry, Kendra Steiner Editions, Mad Swirl, and Unlikely Stories.

You can find more of Luis’ work here on Ink Pantry.

Poetry Drawer: With a Word: A Single Birthday: The Essenes by Dr Susie Gharib

With a Word

I adorn my mind each morning with a word
as a queen for her coronation is adorned with gold,
with associations to combat the foul breath that is spewed
from establishments,
individuals,
and the rituals of the modern world.

Though sharing three consonants with its adversary numb,
nimble is my armor against stagnation,
stupor,
and getting outrun
by the spurious and the arrogant.

I resort to sedate in times of turmoil
when warfare sharpens its fangs and claws,
when rockets compete for the bull’s eye that is wrought
by profiteers who have been wooing my hometown port.

Sanguine is my anodyne for un-halcyon days
when depression is depleting both pockets and spirits
and Hope is an effigy that pins impale
whose sister Mercy is being burnt at the stake.

A Single Birthday

I imagine what a single birthday would be like
spent with her:
a home-made cake that her hands deck with nuts,
with candles that are not to be blown out.
Two glasses of sweet wine
brewed by her ancestors
in the vicinity of their country vineyard.
An apple pie.
And some milk chocolate that instantly melts
in my mind
before it reaches my mouth.

A bottle of perfume
with a blue ribbon round its neck.
A white hairband for my ponytail.
A strapless bikini for my next summer holiday.
A puzzle to keep me busy on lonely nights.
And a tearless goodbye.

The Essenes

Their mode of existence was marked by numbers –
these offsprings of David, the Nazarenes –
by sacred geometry.

Even-tempered and compassionate,
they kept no servants or slaves
and equal
men and women were declared.

The hand that was placed on top of the head
had learnt the art of healing
both the afflicted and the sick.

They consumed their meals in utter silence,
the vegetarian meek
who drank nom fermented liquids
and because purification was uppermost,
they lived by rivers and lakes
to keep themselves cleansed.

On Mount Carmel they pursued the truth,
the illumination of inner lives,
so the Book of Enoch was among other texts
that their precious library kept
and both john the Baptist and Jesus Christ
received their blessings and enlightenment.

And sleep, which for modern thinkers contains the residue
of the day’s turbulence and joys,
is a source of deep knowledge,
so the last thoughts before a slumber
are to be purified and purged
to keep the power of the mind intact.

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.