The Loneliness of Exotic Creatures, by Michael Brockley

Last fall, you picked the low hanging fruits before they ripened so a woman on a sangria diet could read your fortune in the freckles of persimmons. On the asymmetries of pears. Every time you ventured into town you found yourself pacing between the pawnshop, the sex toy parlor and Mad Mama Monique’s Blunderbusses and Other Seasonal Wreathes. You always returned home with empty arms. The money in your pocket replaced with postcards posted by John Dillinger. You wandered into the private lives of paintings. Loitered near telephone conversations from the days of party lines. All the possibilities of love that slipped away while you read the Irish poets. To your credit, you never said, I’ll never be caught dead. Yet you drove the getaway car and ran a pickpocket school on the West Side for thirteen years. Lately, you’ve begun to hoard photographs of Josephine Baker with her cheetah, Chiquita. Of Frida Kahlo with her fawn, Granizo. All around you, the world invigorates itself with small, blue explosions. There are kangaroos falsettoing doo-wop ballads in stairwells while ocelots audition for the lead in a play about Falstaff and Don Quixote. You pawned your grandfather’s war metals to buy a book of pickup lines. If you eavesdrop while your neighbors make love to Bye Bye Blackbird, you can convince yourself you are the  descendant of the anteater that walked Salvadore Dalí

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Michael Brockley is a 67-year old school psychologist who works in rural northeast Indiana. His poems have appeared in Flying Island, Zingara Poetry Picks, Panoplyzine, Third Wednesday, Rat’s Ass Review, Poetry Breakfast, Gyroscope Review and i am not a silent poet. Poems are forthcoming in Atticus Review and Gargoyle.