Mitch Grabois

He’d Never Met a Skinhead Hater

Thirty years ago
gentle Singh opened a jewelry box
to reveal eight kinds of pot
Sikhs are not too different from Rastafarians, he said
He grinned, and his long hair fell from his turban
He took a long toke
and reminded us that he was from a warrior class
With great pleasure he described ancient hand weapons
and their gristly uses
He’d never met a skinhead hater
with an automatic weapon

Tossing the I Ching

Careaga visits the same fountain
every five years on his birthday
It’s like tossing the I Ching
or asking God to write his name in the
Book of Life on Yom Kippur
Will he finally be recognized as the genius he is
and be hoisted in a chair above everyone’s head
like a Jewish groom,
or will he have to go back to the mailroom
and schlep mail?

He's Hardly a Robin

A bleached robin pulls a worm
from a brown spot on my lawn
I’ve applied Revive three times
but the blazing sun has its way
Drought has its way
I’m no tender green blade

© Mitch Grabois 2012

Mitch Grabois’ poetry and short fiction has appeared in over seventy literary magazines, most recently The Examined Life, Memoir Journal, Marco Polo Arts Mag, and Haggard and Halloo, all published this Spring and Summer. His novel, Two-Headed Dog was published in April by Dirt e-books, founded by NY agent Gary Heidt. He was born in the Bronx and now lives in Denver.

Brian Barbeito

NASCENT TALK WITH THE GYPSY

She was having a laugh, but I didn’t know what about. We were sitting in a big house that was on the top of a large incline. All these books were scattered around, and the walls and the kitchen, the doors and the quarter round and every other thing, was old and betrayed. But I liked it. There was this subdued intense energy there, and maybe it was the energy of the past, fading out, but still making a signature on the present. I was glad to be speaking to her because she was fat and homely looking. Some of the others of her large group, one especially, were thin and beautiful and mysterious. But they were sketchy in their own ways with a type of stain of unleavened self importance. This one laughing was on the level, and we just talked about a few things with no ulterior motives or vested interest on either side.
“What is the funny thing?” I asked her.
“The radio yesterday. The man drove us in the car. They were playing a song that you have about a Gypsy woman. We were all laughing.”
“That is not a song I have. That is an old song.”
“Gypsy woman, gypsy woman, gypsy woman...”
She looked out the window and laughed some more. I said that some people said her group was supposed to be called Roma. She brushed her hand down across her side like she was discarding something and the movement said, ‘Please, don’t patronize me. Such things are silly...’
“What makes a gypsy....a gypsy,” I asked.
To this she held up her arm and pinched her skin, to denote that the skin contained her blood, and said in seriousness,” Gypsy is in the blood. Gypsy is the best blood.”
I asked if it had been hard where she had been.
“They killed my brother. And then they killed my cousin,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because Gypsy.”
“Who killed them?”
“Skinheads. At nightclub. After nightclub. One year ago only. Don’t like gypsy. Much trouble for gypsy people.”
We looked out the window. The house seemed to be able to hold any emotion, as if its joints and stucco and brick were now transformed into a strong person, a present person yet one whose face we could not see. The hydro lines and telephone lines stretched through rural hills outside like elastics that never broke, and if one did break, there were others that kept up the work of going along and along and along. In a moment a group of about two or three entered the room and broke the energy, the almost sacred place that a conversation can be with the wind going outside and the night coming. She winked at me, as if to say it was alright and not to take her too seriously, and she called to the others because it was their joke of that week, ‘Gypsy woman, gypsy woman, gypsy woman!’ I shot a glance outside. Tops of septic tanks were overgrown with wild bushes, and the alarm panels rose up and up affixed to metal poles, a series of mechanical and industrial sprouts that received the splashes of sun in the days and heard from the windows the stories relayed at nights from the house.
The other women laughed back while the old books and quarter round absorbed and took the collective noise in stride.

© Brian Barbeito 2012

Brian Barbeito is a resident of Ontario, Canada. His short fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming at various venues such as character i, MuDJoB, MudSpots, and Thrice Fiction.