Issue 11.2 Spring 2016

11.2 cover image

 

About the Author

Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois has had over a thousand of his poems and fictions appear in literary magazines in the U.S. and abroad. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, The Best of the Net, and Queen's Ferry Press's Best Small Fictions for work published in 2011 through 2015. His novel, Two-Headed Dog, based on his work as a clinical psychologist in a state hospital, is available for Kindle and Nook, or as a print edition. To see more of his work, google Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois. He lives in Denver.

 

Heart

 

Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois

 

 

1.
I’m staying in the oldest Irish bar in the city. I come downstairs to get my bangers and mash from the kitchen and Old Bushmills from the bar. I still have IRA weapons in the trunk of my car. Jim McCallum is still trying to raise money to kill Orangemen.

 

God saves the queen—she lives on and on. But hardly anyone dies these days—they just keep getting more ancient. One might wish for the death of the war criminal Dick Cheney, but it’s like the weather—no one does anything about it.

 

They even gave that fucker a new heart. Can you imagine that?

 

 

2.

A saint surfed down a live volcano’s lava. He was hoping for a date with the Hawaiian goddess Pele, but she was out on the soccer field running back and forth without a ball, trying to work off the extra weight she’d put on eating Spam in all its variations.


The saint looked up to see the lava curl over him and said to himself: This is good. This is rich. A little volcano splatter will impress foxy Pele.


But Pele was in chains in a Weight Watchers meeting. Her blubber was crying its own tears. Her fiery image was in batik on the walls. Everyone chanted: How great you were!

 

The surfing saint hit a rough spot as he approached the shore. He twisted his board away from lava that had cooled a thousand years ago. He had an image of the goddess Pele disabled in an Old Folks Home on the green sand beach where a giant tsunami had once hit.

 

 

3.
Consumerism pulls me out like a rip tide, but I’m a strong swimmer and learned long ago to swim across the rip to make my way to shore. On my back on the beach, breathing hard, I need nothing but these breaths, and the pretty shells scattered around me, calcium in the shape of life.
I raise the largest to my ear. It speaks to me in Arabic. It says: Help us, please.

 

 

4.

Words should not be wasted on vegetables and birds. There are too many orphans needing our language, too many refugees threatened by terrorists on one side and right-wing Amerikan extremists on the other.

 

 

5.
While I’m at the bar drinking my whiskey, the barman hands me a letter from my ex-wife in America.  I begin reading it immediately. She reports that she threw her violin into a rocky field. It wasn’t the expensive one that she uses for concerts.


Her audition trail ended with a job playing for the Nashville Symphony Orchestra. Soon it was too late to go elsewhere. She disliked the South and detested country music. Nashville seemed a tacky place to have a classical career.


Her violin caught a gust of wind and flew much further than she’d expected. It landed among the dry remnants of blue and white wildflowers. She heard it hit against a rock. It wasn’t an instrument she cared about.

 

 

6.
The cunning farmer raises thirty wind turbines close around my house. You see, the fix was in. I am so disquieted by the wind noise and the shadow flicker, but especially the subsonic vibration, that I go crazy and dynamite one (they didn’t know that I was a munitions expert in the Army)…

 

 

7.
And now it’s Thanksgiving. My wife is watching the Macy’s Day parade. I float through like the Snoopy balloon or a bloated float that represents yet another greedy corporation. I’ve divested myself of all stocks and bonds. I don’t want to make money from others’ exploited labor.

 

 

8.
but I miscalculate and the turbine falls on my house (luckily my wife and kids are in town, at the doctor’s office) and no one is hurt except my old Australian Shepherd who was crazy as hell and ran around in the back of my pickup chasing his tail fifteen miles into town and back again never stopping, barking like a dog possessed and now he’s gone. I’ve killed him.

 

 

9.
Saint Surfer, Pele’s male concubine, thought: I’d like to be buried with a boom box, so I can boogie my way into Hell. I’d play my CD of Rokie Erikson and the Thirteenth Floor Elevator, the first psychedelic band, and make guards from all insane asylums march in my funereal parade like the members of a ghetto high school marching band.


I’d play Dylan. I’d play Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat.  I’d take all the yearning in the world and all the yearning roasting in Hell like a rotisserie chicken from King Sooper’s Supermarket and stuff it into that pillbox hat and send it to Jackie O.


Jackie O came to Hell and became Jackie Oh Oh. She and Marilyn scratched each other’s eyes out which was a mutual blessing as they could no longer see the hellish mayhem going on around them

 

 

10.
Other news from my ex: Her brother, an amateur beekeeper, had been attacked by a swarm of bees. His wife had contracted Lupus and didn’t have the energy to attend to his stings. The family’s oldest daughter, just entering high school, was showing early signs of schizophrenia.


Their basement had had a hidden leak and now their cellar was filled with black mold, an aggravation to Lupus. There was nothing my ex could do about the problems her brother and his family were having so she threw her old violin into the field.


I put down the letter, took a sip of whiskey, and pondered how I might respond to it.

 

 

11.
Then I went to prison. I told myself it was for the death of my dog. Those windmills cost a million dollars each. I wish I’d had the TNT to blow them all up.

 

 

12.
After that (and I knew it wasn’t a coincidence) The Rain Party Disaster Society recruited me to be a suicide bomber. If I blew up all my poems and walked away, they would reward me with 99 naked poetesses in heaven, poetesses who had abandoned poetry but had kept their tattoos, stark against their white, white skin. They’d also retained their starkly outlined eyebrows and the severe glasses that proclaimed lesbianism and/or subway toughness.


At the last minute, I chickened out. I wasn’t as brave, stupid and single-minded as a member of the Islamic State. I went back home to live with my mother. She left me every day to go to work in a sweat shop. I stayed home. I refused to go to school because of the constant bullying, even though I was bigger than everyone. I was nothing but a punching bag. Even the teachers derided me. Then my mother came home from work and poked at me with knitting needles and gave me lessons in why I was helpless and hopeless.


But the Rain Party Disaster Society is persistent. I’m on their mailing list. They send me catalogues showing me the naked poetesses who will join me in heaven. They sent me a free copy of the book Five People You Meet in Heaven but I haven’t read it yet.

 

 

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