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For every poet who knows what it’s like

There’s a woman in the front row

who has started to cough.


I spent seven wretched hours

on a rancid bus to get here,

to read poetry in this bookshop,

in front of fifty-six people

and now one of them

is coughing up a squall,

doing a fabulous seal imitation,

lacking only flippers

and an inflatable ball.


The store had laid out padded chairs

and a table full of books –

mine and those of a trio of poets

who’d read before my turn had come:


in feather-dropping silence,

in monastic quietude,

in that attentive hush that happens

when the audience is rapt in words.


I raise my voice in hopes of drowning

the woman’s incessant hacks,

bellowing there’s truth in affirmation

and in eyes that see past stars!


And my pacing is off,

my inflection is chaotic,

my ability to focus

easily thwarted

by gurgling phlegm.


I want to stop abruptly –

ask her what her problem is,

if she’s a smoker who’s never quit,

if she waited for me to begin my set

before unleashing her pent-up noise.


But I forge on in a smouldering stride,

thankful I’ve saved

my favourite poem

for the climactic dénouement,

grateful she’s just left her seat

and gone off to the back of the shop,


where, if I’d been more observant,

I would have noticed the coffee bar,

the gleam

of frothing machines,

figured she’d forego

the Buckley’s,


embrace the whirr

that cappuccinos bring.




Andreas Gripp


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