Poetry-Turning Points 2021

HIBAH SHABKHEZ

LOST IN TRANSLATION

We wait. We wait a little longer. We begin to fidget and peer at the tracks. We wait …
At long last we hear the familiar rattle of the train.
“Oh, thank God!” exclaims the mother beside me holding a little blonde girl by the arm.
“Alhamdulillah!” echoes the mother behind her pushing a baby-stroller. The little blonde girl blinks dazedly as her mother begins to scream.

HONI SOIT QUI MAL Y PENSE

The barks of seagulls and dogs egged us on as we stood beside the passerelle named for Senghor, two desis connected by an almost-common origin gulping French fries out of the same cone in an unspoken competition verging on the grim. We had met perhaps twice in our one shared class and would not have called ourselves friends, or even real acquaintances. Yet here we were, gobbling fries bought with our pooled coins. They had the unmistakable aftertaste of spiced mayo and homesickness found nowhere else in the world.

“I’m going to Annecy for the holidays,” I said at last, à propos of nothing.
“And maybe to Lyon en route.”

She scrabbled for another three-finger lot of chips and found instead just the one shrivelled brown crisp, because I had already scooped up the rest. It was not exactly a glare she gave me as she scrunched up the cone and prepared to launch it into the bin, but I grinned triumphantly all the same and only-just buried it in restaurant tissue-paper. Three afro-headed teens racing each other down the clattering planks knocked the paper-ball out of her fingers into the water instead.

“Kaalay.” She said, putting the last crisped chip in her mouth.

“What?!”

“That’s where I am going. For the holidays.”

“Oh. Calais!”

“Yeah, I’ve always wanted to go there.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Me too. I’m thinking I should go there in Feb …” She watched me babbling on in faint annoyance, not realising that I had managed to nail half a dozen -isms to her single word before she had swallowed her mini-bite.

The gulls snarked in my reddening face, and I scowled back at them with interest. Even off the bridge, the world was rocking most ungently under my feet.

HIBAH SHABKHEZ is a writer of the half-yo literary tradition, an erratic language-learning enthusiast, a teacher of French as a foreign language and a hap-pily eccentric blogger from Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has previously appeared in Black Bough, Cordite Poetry, Ligeia, Nine Muses and a number of other literary magazines.

HIBAH SHABKHEZ‘S poems were first published in 2021 in Turning Points: Owl Light Literary No. 1.