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
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
