Live Encounters Poetry & Writing March 2025
Practicing English While Driving, poems by Susana H Case.
Practicing English While Driving
At a bar in Veliko Tarnovo we meet a man
who offers to drive us to Bucharest next morning
but never shows up, so I convince Sara we have
no choice except to hitchhike—her first time,
reluctant—thumbs out by the road, until a trucker
sees us, two young women in jeans, brakes
squeal, we climb in, the driver shouts
Americans! all excited and, wanting to practice
a bit of English, he offers Commodores,
it being the early eighties with Lionel Ritchie
still their lead, and I respond Donna Summer,
a little late for disco, and he throws back
Rolling Stones, grins at the game,
Michael Jackson, Pink Floyd, soon runs
out of singers or groups he’s heard of,
so he starts with cars: Cadillac, Buick,
BMW, and Sara, recovered from her pout, finally
yells Mercedes, and launches into the lyrics
of Janis’ “Mercedes Benz,” me joining in,
a song for which he doesn’t know the words,
but drums out the beat on his steering wheel,
grinning all the way down the highway.
Tenderly
Months after we sneak the chunky Senufo stool
past customs, an effusion of small dark bugs
spills out onto our living room floor. We didn’t
fumigate the wood. Our Scottie discovers the insects,
stares, frozen in curiosity, but you’re the one
who murders them. For this, you’re my hero,
my “Coney Island Baby,” as the song goes.
You’re not from anywhere near Coney Island.
New Year’s Day, bundled up, we go there, watch
the ritual as swimmers rush into the sea.
It’s our anniversary and fourteen degrees
Fahrenheit. We walk to what remains
of Steeplechase Park, stand under the steel tower
with tea, instead of wine, and vow we’ll keep
our chips on the table for twelve more months.
Some years together are like riding the old
Parachute Jump: couples belted into canvas seats,
brought up 250 feet and dropped. A mystery
to me, the appeal of that kind of thrill. The tower
has aged into a kind of dubious structural
integrity—unstable, too hard-won to tear down.
“La donna è mobile” / The woman is fickle
In a video that went viral, the opera singer
Maurizio Marchini, from his balcony
in Florence, belts out “La donna è mobile,”
Verdi’s version of the lament of priapic
King Francis I who didn’t trust women
or their emotions, thought men who did
were fools. In Rigoletto—and the Victor Hugo
play that inspired it—a woman dies.
Yet it is mostly men who are fickle and cold
in these cases of blame-the-woman.
When I was thirteen, my friend’s mother
went to the hospital. She liked careful
attention, didn’t want to go home,
cried, put her paperback novels and lipstick
into a tote bag, before her husband pushed her
in a wheelchair to the exit yelling
women don’t know what they want.
Home in Brooklyn, she sank into silence.
Soon after, she died.
As they float tourists out over the sediment,
Venetian gondoliers favor Verdi’s aria,
its unromantic sentiment. Their boats
are popular with proposing men. A yes
to such an overture is not always the best response.
© Susana H Case
Susana H. Case is the award-winning author of nine books of poetry, most recently, If This Isn’t Love, Broadstone Books, and co-editor with Margo Taft Stever of I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe, Milk & Cake Press, an Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, as well as Finalist for the American Book Fest Awards, and the International Book Awards. The first of her five chapbooks, The Scottish Café, Slapering Hol Press, was re-released in an English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka by Opole University Press and as an English-Ukrainian edition, Шотландська Кав’ярня by Slapering Hol Press. https://www.susanahcase.com