The Taxi Driver’s Testimony

Ioannis Kalkounos

You cannot choose your passengers —

he asked for the closest body of water

and I drove him to the sea at 3am.

He swam for an hour. I slept in the car.

On the way back he was different —

eyes like oil spills in the rearview mirror,

he looked older. When I hit a pothole

he coughed up exoskeletons of molluscs,

which, somehow, reminded me of ore.

Of course, he didn’t pay and I didn’t ask.

I was afraid — how often does a man

turn into a seal in your back seat?

Yes, I must be the last one who saw him

crawling towards the alley, but then I left —

the rest I heard on the radio today.

First published in Gutter #31

Ioannis Kalkounos is a poet from Greece, currently living in Edinburgh. He won a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award in 2020, and his poetry has appeared in Ambit, Gutter, The Scores and elsewhere. In 2011, his poetry pamphlet dakryma was published in Athens.