Over Dinner
Sophie Fenella

The sound of silver on China white blood stained plate
gives our shelter away.
Evelyn – or is it Jonathan – is having one of their dinners.
Are there holes in your roof?
She had her place redecorated recently,
we learn this with a mouthful of roast lamb;
our lips, lined with grease, glisten like cling film.
The curtains are fringed, like her sixties bob hair,
in the late summer evening breeze they rustle;
we know nothing of cold winds.
NGO lingo complements dessert wine.
Her company has done great work in Syria,
we learn this with a mouthful of jazz, and feel
oh so retro. Our tongues are as velvet as
the bottom of a bottle of Merlot.
She dances with her wine glass, furrows her brow,
It really is terrible. Syria, she means.
I notice her passport, pristine, unscathed
and question what any of us know
about change. We pull weeds from commissioned
gravestones, pull out our arteries when watching the news,
but know nothing of broken kitchen tables;
and after chewing lamb bones, we eat
truffles. The cocoa gives me nightmares, something about
a tooth, lying on a street corner.

Sophie Fenella is poet and a performer from London. She is part of the Burn After Reading poetry collective run by Jacob Sam-La Rose, and has performed at festivals and events such as Boom Town, Secret Garden Party, Bang Said the Gun and National Poetry Day Live. Her work has featured in Magma, Rising and been commended in the Sentinel Literary Quarterly Competition.

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