[A reading of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities] The word reeks with the ravings of mankind,the spilling of blood that is redder than wine,the chopping of heads like chickens’ at the slaughterhouse,the barbarous pillage of every temple of God,the perpetuation of the legacy of original but now genetic crime.And amid the stench of persecuted blooda man sought the guillotine to part with his … Continue reading Revolution by Susie Gharib
{In memory of our assassinated dog} His Achilles’ heel was his very loud barksthat won him the enmity of the entire neighborhood, whose idea of a pet is a silent toy with which one could loiter lethargic afternoons, or flaunt one’s wealth in the ability to buy and feed a very expensive dog. It was only on the day we buried him that we learned the very bitter fact that some … Continue reading Eviction by Susie Gharib
He daily commutes to work on the wings of a moth who is inebriated,and sips his drink from a bluebell that is with liquor satiated,then calculates his sums on a papyrus with a quill whose inkis the darkest wine that Gascony had fabricated. His weekend is a six-day break on the shores of a reservoir,a Scottish distillery’s grounds,whose breezes are with whiskey impregnated,a canopy of intoxicationfor a man who … Continue reading The Dreams He Sees by Susie Gharib
The tenant of Wildfell Hall, in an aesthetic style,amputated small talk with a palette knife. Catherine Cookson, the child with no “Da”became the Dame of the British Empire.I look ahead and people melt before my eyes,their solidity dissolving into a mere mirage,a fragmented lie.I have learned to reduce to invisibilitywhoever attempts to pollute my pathwith tongues that waglike resurrected hags’. They bite into names with rabid … Continue reading Gossip by Susie Gharib
A clown was my metaphor for the purely puerile.I resented his theatrics to elicit a smilesince I had always been too serious a child. I watched the film trailer and his fiery garbmade my lips curl with its giddy style,but there was something in the way he moved about,after his metamorphosis into a butterfly,that caught my attention and haunted my mind. My armor was pierced … Continue reading Nimble: Joker (2019) by Susie Gharib
There are no pins with which to torture dolls,no potions extracted from a viper’s blood,no drugging to induce paralysis,no incantations to make one hallucinate,no animal slaughtering to appease the gods,no sexual dalliance with the demonic lot.Maleficium is an electronic cult. They can bleed your name on a digital blade,frame you with Lucifer on a hot blind date,rearrange your features with a mouse’s aid,make you the … Continue reading Sorcery in the Twenty-First Century by Susie Gharib
What’s behind this preoccupation with UFOs, this anticipation of ferocious foes? Aren’t the contorted, alien forms with ugly horns a reflection of your own distorted souls? You project your own mania for wars your abductions of slaves, infants and thrones, your inhuman experiments on animals and clones on extraterrestrial norms. What if our eyes are radiant beams that covet not, nor evil breathe. What if … Continue reading An Alien’s Perspective by Susie Gharib
The sun always shines on TV, sang Morten in the nineteen-eighties when I was poring over books in a tiny room that overlooked Glasgow’s Necropolis cemetery, constantly fending off the blows of smog-and-fog-related melancholies. When my eyes sought a little respite from perusing Lawrence’s Aristocracy of the Sun, on monumental headstones they would alight, nestling to tributes on epitaphs, speculating on how Young, Blair and … Continue reading Suns by Susie Gharib
