A Pie in the Face for the Betrayed
“I think I need some space”, he says.
He's not the be-cruel-to-be-kind
type.
He's the tiptoe-around-it-for-years-
and-eventually-whisper-a-half-truth-
through-a-mouthful-of-meringue
type.
(Do not try this at home.
You'll blind your crumpling,
collapsing listener with a spray of
tiny white flecks of sweet and eggy
mendacity.)
A sour, bitter and lemony whole truth is blanketed
by frothy circumlocution, by a towering cumulus
built of straight-out-of-the-lab, sweet-and-airy,
Sweet'N Low, non-nutritive, low-cal
nothingness.
He knows where he's going; that he's
going.
Something may have shifted during flight.
She senses that this plane is going
down.
Visibility reduced to zero,
only billowing meringue and,
faintly, a burning engine,
are perceptible now through her
window.
His false, sticky reassurances
drip down from the overhead
speakers, even as the lemon-coloured,
lemon-shaped oxygen masks
deploy.
P.W. Bridgman’s third and fourth books – Idiolect (poetry) and The Four-Faced Liar (short fiction) –were published in 2021 by Ekstasis Editions. A fifth – a novella-in-verse entitled Deliverance, 1961: A Novella in Thirty-two Cantos – is forthcoming from Pooka Press in 2023. Bridgman’s writing has appeared in, among others, The Moth Magazine, The Glasgow Review of Books, Skylight 47, The High Window, Litro, The Honest Ulsterman, The Galway Review, The Canadian Poetry Review, the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies and The Maynard.
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