Two Poems by Len Kuntz

Menagerie

by Len Kuntz

 

There is a seam in this bottle

Straight as a cesarean scar

Where the two glass halves kiss

I would like to be constructed like that

Bound and connected to another thing so perfectly

Outside on the dock by the lake hatpin skinny girls

In string bikinis absorb midday sun

Believing it will cure something

Camouflage or strip away certain sins

So boys will see them differently

I’d like to tell them not to be so foolish

That perfection is a manmade hoax

A menagerie in photo-shopped magazines

But then I shouldn’t even be looking their way

Men under twenty maybe yes

But not a derelict fifty year old like me

The sexiest thing close at hand is

This table littered with drained Coronas

And an ashtray without ash

Gleaming like a colorless eye

Empty but for a discarded wedding band

 

 

Fishing

by Len Kuntz

 

This is the perfect place

For drowning

Have you noticed?

It’s deepest in the cove

Where someone demolished

The beaver dam of evergreen limbs

Laced like arthritic fingers

Beneath the green-gray murk

 

Take the chain and tie it around my waist

Synch it tight because

I’m so thin now that people think I’m dying

Toss me overboard with an anchor

Count to one hundred backwards

Then float to the other end

Where all the really big fish

Are bored and biting

 

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Len Kuntz is a writer from Washington State, an editor at the online magazine Literary Orphans, and the author of I’M NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HERE AND NEITHER ARE YOU out now from Unknown Press.  You can also find him at lenkuntz.blogspot.com