Stephen Bett
Summer 2025 | Poetry
Ismail Kadare, The Accident
(opening lines; trans, John Hodgson)
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?
Stephen Bett is a widely and internationally published Canadian poet with 26 books in print from BlazeVOX, Chax, Spuyten Duyvil, Ekstasis Editions, Thistledown Press,& others. His personal papers are archived in the “Contemporary Literature Collection” at Simon Fraser University. His website is stephenbett.com