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. |