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Ismail Kadare, The Accident

It seemed the most ordinary kind of incident. A taxi had veered off the airport autobahn at kilometre marker 17. Its two passengers were killed outright, and the driver…

There it is again (there it
is again)            saucy seventeener 

Taxiing down an empty runway
triggers en masse (as we said)

You’ve been warned (numerously)
more a’ dat pussyshit nonsense
stuck on marker 17

Don’t base your suk’cess on
someone’s material ass’pect
turn a leaf please —
verso      reverso      (recto)

71% of busy’ness is water-marked
— gutters on the margins
floating kenophobic void

You’ll never know an outright
from a wrong take

So where was the driver,     a conniver
inside his novel lines?

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(opening lines; trans, John Hodgson)

  • Stephen Bett is a Canadian poet published internationally and the author of 26 books from presses including BlazeVOX, Chax, and Spuyten Duyvil. His recent titles include Broken Glosa (Chax, 2023) and SongBu®st (BlazeVOX, 2024). His papers are housed in Simon Fraser University’s Contemporary Literature Collection.