MAGICIAN
The old man lifted himself from the chrome wheel chair and stood bravely before the audience. He waved a red bandana in the air, spun around three times, and slid into a pair of hiking boots. We could hear his leather belt mooing beside the scuff marks on the rubber soles. Slowly his wool slacks floated to the floor covering a herd of tiny sheep hooves. We watched the fibers of his white shirt flow like sunlight through the window out onto the cotton fields across the highway. Buttons rolled to the corners of the stage.
“He must have been a nudist” we said as we left the auditorium applauding wildly.
Outside, a dirty parking lot kept ejecting sports cars into the speeding highway
Some of us peered in through the side windows and noticed the magician’s watch dangling from a bird’s nest
It was still ticking and a few light rays kept bouncing off a jumbled pile of medals lying on a practice putting green
SACRED SPOON
A single silver spoon lay untouched
On a coffee table in South Omaha
At my grandmother’s house
Stolen – she claimed – from Edmund Spenser’s
Irish castle before it was torched
Wrapped in flannel
Carried aboard a ship
Bound for Nebraska
Via the Brooklyn Bridge
The ice cream & cookies & cake
Were great at Birthday Parties
But what made her think
We wanted oat meal & old bananas
Which would always taste
Like a rotting potato from Ireland
PRAYER BESIDE A BIG LOTS DUMPSTER
In an alley of garbage bags
Blue & white & black & orange & red & green & brown
A thin man kneeling with gray hair
Wearing a Randy Moss Vikings jersey
Opens a tiny yellow plastic jar
And says out loud Oh
And then louder Holy cow
As he pushes a fistful
Of honey roasted peanuts into his mouth
It's the moonlight and the snow
That holds him in a photograph
His right hand stuffing what's left
Of the peanuts into a large coat pocket
Whispering Snow and Holy snow
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