The Ceiling Pounds in Atlanta
Kalen Rowe



And I wonder what happens
Once at eight and again at one
That pounds my cheap hotel ceiling
Like a meteor storm
It sounds like children playing
Or a gagged hooker being thrashed
By trained alligators
There is an indecipherable voice
That reminds me of pigeons
How when you try to grasp one
It flies from your hands
Like a magic trick
I wonder if I take my big knife
And shove it through the ceiling
Would a child or an animal scream
And would the blood be red or black




The Silver Palace


Like most Chinese buffets
Was a buffet of faces
Looking at questionable steaming
Dishes and painting a picture
Of sushi and pizza and ice cream
And General Tso’s Chicken
Eyes squinting into metal trays
Scooping here and there
Or completely stunned
On what to pick next
Or retracing the fried rice
For what looked like an ear
I too chose with a paranoid frenzy
Like a lizard flipping its tongue
Then I sat down with colleagues
And cleaned my plate of skin
From pork dumplings and sauce
In the hive we ate with little thought
And craved the simple freedoms
Of chocolate or vanilla or swirled
And the buffet assembly line
Like a half-eaten giant pink peach
On a shiny silver platter
Fortune cookies unwrapped
One of them smashed to bits
Intentionally or not
On top of the receipt
One missing a fortune
And two bearing the same
A promise of promotion soon
One of them mine
Which I handed to my boss
Ritualistically like a reflex




The Grand Canyon


Where human beings first learn
To operate cameras and freeze
Their faces into atrocities
For extended periods of time
You will find yourself trapped in
By half a dozen lines of sight
It would be rude to walk through
Leaving your body a permanent mark
In a stranger’s camera roll
Everyone hogs the railings
And wants to push each other over
In different languages
People turn their backs to a miracle
To patronize squirrels
And everyone becomes a kid
I do not know why, but maybe
It is the accessibility of death and awe
Preserved so liberally with the tempting
Open cliff
It’s easy to imagine someone
Tumbling down the side
There are graphics of it everywhere
So I keep walking along the path
Checking over my shoulder
But it never really happens
And then I see a crow
Too big to be a crow
And to the canyon someone says
This is not what I imagined
I am not impressed

About the author:
Kalen Rowe lives in Houston, Texas. He has been published by Gargoyle Magazine (forthcoming), Phantom Kangaroo, The Aletheia, and multiple times by Glass Mountain. In 2013 he helped found and now edits for Anklebiters Publishing, which prints Poets Anonymous and Primitive. He can be found at here.