STORY TELLING
God raised an eyebrow, twitching nothing into possibility
Questions blessed with spit and mistakes
Universes quoting Beckett long before college students would
The day I was born was the hottest of August
One undeclared war had reached an exhausted truce
Mine was just beginning, an invader searching for a DMZ
Ammunition of guilt to shame
My eyebrow split open when I was five
As I fell into a spike in a stone wall bordering Prospect Park
The butterfly I chased turned and laughed
Or it may have been a parent
Stitches and judgment closed a wound
Beneath the scar a memory of risk sends ripples
In the dust of childhood
My father seemed a dowser in a drought believing the stick and the con
My mother heard Django Reinhardt in the squeal of the BMT
My brother saw cracks in thin ice as invitations to skate
Seven decades of leaps and stumbles on a road imagined into existence
Time to fill in the blanks with stories I am finally ready to tell
BOY UNDER THE TABLE
He bends to fit into a space small and dark
His hands shake, the cup on the desk spills juice on the paper with his number
Two tears, one for each parent, slip out of his left eye
The right holds one for himself
His mother was crying, his father screaming
He doesn’t want to remember that
So he thinks of the night in the desert, his mother stroking his head, humming their favorite song
There is no music here, under the table
The tear he can no longer hold
Follows the curve of his cheek, falling on the floor
To disappear
He has heard that before
Tonight he begins to understand it
He closes his eyes
The knock on the door is thunder
Glenn Moss is a media lawyer and has been writing poetry and stories since high school. While at Binghamton University, he wrote a play for a course in Jacobean Literature, and while at Case Western Reserve Law School, a play for a course in Jurisprudence. Upon his return to NYC, he wrote poetry and stories amidst contracts and business plans. Each area of writing enriches the other, with contracts benefiting from a bit of poetic dance. He has poems and stories published in Ithaca Lit, West Trade Review, Oddville Press, Oberon, Foliate Oak Magazine, Illuminations, Qu, 34th Parallel and Harbinger Asylum.
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