Peace Pipe
Now! she goes. He sucks hard, the bowl seethes, smoke shoots up the stem, down his throat, fills his lungs. He tries hard to hold it in, coughs, chokes it out in racking spasms. She laughs. What’s he like?
He hopes this will bring them together, sharing a smoke, having a laugh. Out the window he sees people queuing at a bus stop in the rain. He counts them – five, six, seven – the years they’ve been apart.
He asks what she remembers. A film you made me watch when I was six, a man gets eaten by ants, everything except his glasses.
Konstandinos Mahoney is a London based poet of Greek-Irish-English heritage. He won publication of his collection, Tutti Frutti,in the Sentinel Poetry Book Competition 2017, and is winner of the Poetry Society’s 2017 Stanza Competition. dinomahoney.co.uk