Poem?

Why Write a Letter When You Could Write a Song or a Poem?

Lou Graves

Ten years ago I sat in a bus terminal in the south of England, with a suitcase and a guitar, and a notebook half-filled with bad poetry. In my pocket was a letter I wrote but didn’t send to a girl I knew I’d never see again. Whiskey breath, tobacco spit, her smell still on my unwashed skin and clothes, the

effluvium of coitus. In a dream I had last year she said, “why write a letter when you could write a song or a poem?” Sometimes it’s easier to love from a distance, where memory can chisel away the sharp and rough edges and make of her a Pygmalion statue to be stood upon a pedestal, to be admired

and worshipped. A haunting memory; and still I hear her voice the way a one-armed man might reach down from time to time to scratch his phantom limb. Her voice, her echo, her smile; the parts of her I trapped in a notebook like a lightening bug caught in a mason jar, like a photograph of a plant that

needs neither water nor sunlight, that neither wilts nor blossoms. Somewhere behind me a cicada bug is searching for a hole in the window. Somewhere Prometheus is still chained to his rock and Sisyphus still struggles with his boulder. Had he any sense he would leave it where it lay at the bottom of the hill and he

would lean his back against it and rest. She is out there somewhere and still, somewhere else, somewhere within, her voice still echoes. Why write a letter when you could write a song or a poem?

Ovals

Mitchell Grabois

I was swimming across oceans across continents This is wonderful exercise my daddy called First the Guinness Book of World Records then the Olympics!

But I disappointed my daddy

I decided records were bad karma People always want to break them

They want to break me people like my daddy and mommy Even after their acrimonious divorce they were united in that

I decided I would not allow anyone to shatter me I would leave the cement confines of pools

reject rectangles forever in favor of circles and ovals

Normalcy

Mitchell Grabois

I worked in a Nursing Home Now I work in a state mental hospital My next job will be in a school for child molesters who are children themselves

Snow 323 has fallen Canada repulses me like an electro-magnet

I take pills to keep me from despair I use Unguentine for my skin conditions I wear a back brace to keep me upright I go to church to keep me upright

Big brains lead to big problems Normalcy constantly decays