2 Poems by Mitchell Krochmalnik Grabois

Xurator

The art museum is an art deco fortress
The curator’s explanations are small poems

At home
those poems
ooze from my pores
and I wipe myself down
and spread the sweat
on my laptop screen

I am in a foreign country
I am always in a foreign country
The curator pretends to be a librarian
but when unleashed
she is a sexual tiger

The curator
is really a Xurator


Rays

Silence is perfect accuracy
there are no mistakes in it
no ego
no ambition
no attempts to subvert or dominate
no desire to extinguish the lives
of others
The pounding of the surf is also accurate

From the deck of a cruise ship
an old man sees a school of rays swimming
and believes he’s seen a vision from God
He is ready to die now

The cruise company
keeps six caskets in its hold
for just this exigency


Bionote

Mitchell Krochmalnik Grabois was born in the Bronx and now splits his time between Denver and a one-hundred-and-twenty-year-old, one room schoolhouse in Riverton Township, Michigan. His short fiction and poems have appeared in hundreds of literary magazines in the U.S. and internationally. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, most recently for his story “Purple Heart” published in The Examined Life in 2012, and for his poem. “Birds,” published in The Blue Hour, 2013. Grabois’s novel, Two-Headed Dog, is available for all e-readers for 99 cents. Click for Kindle. Click for Nook. Click for the print edition. grabmitch@hotmail.com