Mitchell Krochmalnik Grabois, 3/3/2014

Current Occupation: Poet
Former Occupation: Novelist
Contact Information: 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. His short fiction and poems have appeared in hundreds of literary magazines in the U.S. and internationally. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, most recently for his story “Purple Heart” published in The Examined Life in 2012, and for his poem. “Birds,” published in The Blue Hour, 2013. Grabois’s novel, Two-Headed Dog, is available for all e-readers for 99 cents. Click for Kindle. Click for Nook. Click for the print edition.

 

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Manslaughter

The accident was the ultimate

What the fuck was I thinking?

Why did I steer so close to the island?

Trauma has confused his memory

Now, with a one-hundred-sixty-foot gash

on the port side of the sunken cruise ship and

thirty-two passengers dead

Captain Shettino, charged with manslaughter

blames his Indonesian helmsman

and the ship itself

As a child he was always doing stunts, says his mother

Her expression is wistful and senile

His father sits heavily under the grape arbor

and has yet another glass of red table wine

He wants to tell his wife to shut up shut up shut up

but knows she won’t

She would never shut up
even when she was in her right mind