Cake
It was the matriarch’s seventieth birthday.
Seventy-first but we will let that pass.
Some un-truths are delicate like lace on
lingerie. Her sous-chef son-in-law baked
confections. No one gushed so he good-
humouredly inquired of them. Dead air
combed his query. When a quidnunc
eyeballed, she was told, “In our family
nobody lies.”
Linn
(1)
Transparent as tears you glide
into my territory. Memory jags
never cease. Hendecasyllabics
hound till they can. I abhor the
abstemious: they remind me
of indulgences.
(2)
Surreptitiously you saunter in and
out of my dome, helplessly I play
host. Even after these many years
there is no awkwardness. The
exchange is easy, accusations too.
Sanjeev Sethi is the author of three books of poetry. His most recent collection is This Summer and That Summer (Bloomsbury, 2015). A Best of the Net 2017 nominee, his poems are in venues around the world: Stickman Review, Ann Arbor Review, Mad Swirl, Neologism Poetry Journal, Olentangy Review, Home Planet News, The Journal, Morphrog 16, Communion Arts Journal, and elsewhere. He lives in Mumbai, India.