by Sasha Grafit*
- Back to the pine box
- Writhing sausages they all are
- And one
- in eagerness
- As he worked
- Typewriter fashion
- Back and forth across
- A sheaf of leaf
- Bit a neighbor’s tail
- Who reared up
- Ready to fight
- Then, forgot and forgave
- They who sleep
- Do not sleep long
- And shed great coats of wasted skin:
- Fashionables
- Leisurely chasing styles
- And their old eyes fall,
- Like spaceman’s visors
- At their sleepy heads
- Like spaceman’s visors
- And fresh pale pupils darken
- And harden in the air exposed
- And when their fat extending cone legs
- Bristle ‘round with fine downy cactus hairs
- I recon
- They’re ripe for cocoonin’
- Soon
- (I remember when they were just sesame seed-size and not yet wise)
- Something disturbingly vampiric
- about how they clamp down
- On the vertebral main vein
- Of a leaf
- And rock with it, junkies on the nod
- Am I a just and benign god to you?
- I demand of them
- While shoveling their filth
- No
- They cry up
- As one
- You are just a bootleg Zeus
- In the lamp heat of this room
- The worm bodies are dry and cool
- Like old noodles
- Or dead witches’ fingers
- They get fat as lords
- On the grub I give ‘em
- Running around chasing
- Mulberry leaves
- In my ‘hood, in my pockets
- Getting yelled at by neighbors
- Jabbering at people in the park
- Frightening children
- As I manically snip and snap, pockets bulging green
- Mulberry leaves
- They get fat as lords
- On the grub I give ‘em
- The only thanks I get is the satisfying
- Crunch crunch of their gourmandizing chowing
- Eating away at my life.
- On the grub I give ‘em
*Sasha Grafit is a M.F.A student in Fiction Writing at Columbia University. He participated in the lab seminar in Spring 2017.
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All this food’ll cost an arm and a leg (I mutter)
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