Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois has had over a thousand of his poems and fiction pieces appear in literary magazines in the U.S. and abroad. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, The Best of the Net, and Queen’s Ferry Press’s Best Small Fictions for work published in 2011 through 2015. 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. Mitchell lives in Denver.
Little Dog Cart
Mitchell Grabois
I started out with a two-hundred dollar Studebaker
but later in life
I was reduced to a little dog cart
I started with a big dog
but ended with a dachshund
and a dachshund can’t even pull a short man
like me
I went to Mexico
and had my stomach stapled
but the dachshund
still looked at me with disgust
Like all dachshunds
he was bitter
and stupid
His IQ test had showed
that he was in the lower quartile for dachshunds
so he was even stupider than most dachshunds
I’d paid a psychologist
ten dollars
to administer the test
ten dollars
I really couldn’t afford
Then true misfortune befell me
They wouldn’t let me back in the USA
even if I promised to leave the dachshund behind
even if I abandoned my cart
even if I left my battered saxophone
even if I stripped down to my
grey underwear
and hobbled into the homeland over
sharp gravel
What part of no don’t you understand,
asked the immigration official
They confiscated my passport
The underling said: Go be a prostitute
and earn the money to hire
some bandito
to guide you across the desert
to the border
But I decided I would stay in Mexico
become a Mexican
and use the money to buy another Studebaker
one that shuddered
even when the engine wasn’t
turned on
Kim Chee
Mitchell Grabois
I worked too hard
in a room that wasn’t even a room
just a roof
Smoke from stripped bark
and other burning tree trash
blew in and burned my lungs
My Korean coworker
brought me pickled cabbage
that he’d buried in his back yard
and redeemed one jar at a time
The kim chee burned my throat
and masked the
damage to my lungs
Woman should be like sheep
he told me
meek and mild
but I was confused
because I thought he’d said ship
Actually he had said ship
but he meant sheep
I finally figured it out
I tried to imagine
my wife, a farmer’s daughter
as meek and mild
and had a good
laugh over that
She wasn’t the vixen kind of farmer’s daughter
that figured in a traveling saleman’s jokes
She was the kind that labors
because there are no sons
in the family
My wife could kick that Korean’s ass
She forbid me to eat kim chee
in the house
It made her nauseated
so I had to eat it outside
I also had to smoke outside
I did those things outside
while my wife watched stupid TV shows
They say that TV shows
have gotten stupider
over the years
but I remember those shows
she watched
and I don’t think anything
could ever be more stupid
