Mitchell Grabois on Recording Session:
"My creative thought processes are largely subconscious, so not really accessible to me. However, this piece grew out of ten years I spent living in our old family farmhouse in an isolated part of rural Michigan. Life is hard there. It's brutally cold and sunless in the winter, people are often isolated from each other, if not geographically, then psychologically, and attempts to find satisfaction are often self-destructive or absurd." Recording Session Babies are here to replace us, and they know it. That’s why they cry. That’s why they look at us with outrage or a clever pretense of love. Get on with it, they silently command us. Raise us up, then get the fuck gone. Tired of raising my grandchildren, progeny of meth heads now in prison, and tired of playing air guitar in the cold barn, I pick up my granddad’s pitchfork. Rusty tines scrape my knuckles as I strum. I jump in the air like a Rolling Stone, and fall down—what the fuck’s happened? The pitchfork is stuck in my leg. I can’t pull it out. I limp to the house, pitchfork dragging. I fall on the kitchen floor. My dog is eating overripe strawberries and doesn’t even look in my direction. My wife is cooking something called quinoa. She asks: Good recording session? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois has had over six hundred of his poems and fictions appear in literary magazines in the U.S. and abroad. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize for work published in 2012, 2013, and 2014. His novel, Two-Headed Dog, based on his work as a clinical psychologist in a state hospital, is available for Kindle and Nook, or as a print edition. He lives in Denver.
1 Comment
10/17/2016 09:06:53 pm
Dear Mitchell: This is an incredibly powerful vignette/memoir. Pardon the easy reference here, but the poem is one heck of stalwart "pitchfork" stabbing mounds of dry hay and our struggle to survive. It captures agony in full, together with the accidental apathy of our modern world. Beautifully executed. I plan to hunt for more of your work.
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