Child Safety Tip

Child Safety Tip

I’m sleeping on the bottom of the ocean

a purple sea urchin my pillow

 

Take many photos

If a child gets taken by a pervert you have a picture of how they were dressed

and what they look like

 

No one took a photo of me

A sea turtle swims by

That boy still sleepin’, it observes

 


Mitchell.GraboisMitchell 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. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, most recently for his story “Purple Heart” published in The Examined Life in 2012. His novel, Two-Headed Dog, is available for all e-readers for 99 cents. A print edition is available through Amazon.

 

 


 

Heart, Album

Heart

Amanda Roundhouse got cut

She wasn’t looking

Her heart’s in a Mississippi chicken shack

among the livers and gizzards

the tabletop carved by people desperate to be remembered

failed poets and novelists

Heavy metal oysters, crackers, Tabasco, Amanda’s heart

 

Album

Amanda is too thin to find in dim light

She bought a leather-bound foto album

but left it on a Greyhound bus

Luckily she’d only put one photo in it

a photo of herself she hated

one in which her face was puffy, her lips mismatched

her breasts fallen

a helpless look

She left it on the bus and now that longhaired girl

is gone

 


Mitchell.Grabois

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. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, most recently for his story “Purple Heart” published in The Examined Life in 2012. His novel, Two-Headed Dog, is available for all e-readers for 99 cents. A print edition is available through Amazon.