The Three Lady Beggars at the Book Premiere
We all know each other, more
or less.
We listen to the reading author
with attention.
No one knows the three
grey old women
in the audience.
When we hear the long
awaited ‘help yourself, please’
the three grey ladies
hurry to the buffet.
We turn our heads away from
them.
Their rotten smell reminds us
of our exit-fee.
They advance without
noticing us.
Beggars regard the others not as people
but as territory.
The three have no place
among us.
We talk of literature,
we will not fill our stomachs with the cheese rolls
and we step back squeamishly
from the reeking gash into a world
that gapes at our cheese rolls,
and has neither read, nor heard of literature.
We search for meaning. We
came here
to treat people to books;
part of the meaning came –
to claim our cheese rolls.
Kristin Dimitrova, My Life in Squares (Middlesbrough: Smokestack Books, 2010), 16.
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