Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2021
The one who comes to clean Richard Krohn enters without knocking before you run the ad, her lips a gloss of floor wax, shocks of hair-mop coiffed by dust spray, wrapped in outraged rags. She laughs at your walls, calls their paper a mockery of buds un-stemmed from gravity, serial perjuries covering for plaster. Blinds? An excuse for not looking, for verbs that refuse to decline. She squints – why does your ceiling choose to slope so low or your vacuum hum so high? -then stages a staring contest with the goldfish, the loser pledging to slide back to the sea. She becomes a feather that tickles the spines of what you’ve left unread, then stiffens into a mannequin, makes naked claims that style is never fitting, donning your clothes to see which ones fall off. Before she leaves she turns into a broom that zooms from room to unkempt room, committing to return only on your most musty day, if ever your motes and you can settle for each other.
Richard Krohn has lived much of his life up and down the East Coast, north and south, but with several years at various times in the Midwest and also in Central America. He presently teaches Economics and Spanish at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. In recent years his poetry has appeared in Poet Lore, Southern Poetry Review, Arts & Letters, Tar River, and Rattle, among many others.
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