ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

Poem
by James Grinwis


Exhibit of Forking Paths

In tablet 12 is a girl in ski boots
wading a lushly gurgling stream.

I am defeated.
In tablet 4, an ex-torture chamber attendant
shucks the shells of shrimps
and crawfish. He is opening
a bar, “The Shuck.” A nosy insect
screams in a tree behind him.

Tablet 222: Mr. R., digging
a small pit for a vial of barbiturates.
The hair on his back is long and fuzzy.

The end of love. A tall sundial.
A genie strangled and left in the curb
like a derelict’s rag.

I am torn. Wasted.
A pummeled plate. A dent.

Tablet 16 hangs from an ambiguous
ceiling fixture. The coronary form
or a used tea-bag smelling of olive juice.
An ear, perhaps a dog’s,
folded over a medium-sized clam shell.
A used bandage also.

In the igneous tree,
I stuck the remains.
My ego slithered off
like a horned lizard into the bubbly mud.

In tablet 70, a walrus. A severed walrus
head. A tusk half-yanked
and jerking under the Floridian wind.
There is a black sun in the scene.

In tablet 71, a snore personified.
It scuttles around as befits
a defeathered hen, a large rock
falling on top of it.

Defeat, failure worming around,
gored, swamped by a conglomerate of waves
and chieftains riding the waves
on smooth seal skin tubs.

Tablet 420 strikes the observer
with its direct attention to the suffering
of abandoned dogs and the crippled boys
and the bleeding-to-death civilians who find them.

Tablet 5, propped on the picaresque night stand,
consists of the fragments of smashed cassette tapes
and shattered compact discs.
They are arranged in such a way
as to resemble the luminous crystals
that burst from the rock on tall mountains
or at the bottom of seas.
A cord extends to an outlet which,
when plugged in, illuminates the tablet
like the scales of a tuna or tweaked moonlight
on the Pacific rim.

Adi loves tablet 637, of the minstrel of cotton
and wine stirring a wine glass
with fingers of needles and stems.
I drink too much, the minstrel thinks.

Of tablet 91, the residents
of the care facility agree: it’s too fruity.

In the care of the critics of scalpel gaze,
an unnumbered tablet has been whisked.
It is a void of few feathers
and a cardboard nose.

In the case of tablet 31, we will not speak.
A boy is alternately blowing his nose
and ringing a doorbell shrilly.