Tag Archives: Ken Poyner

Your job is to tend the herd of giraffes that lounge in the median of Granby Street.  You bring water and food several times a day, and that is the time most likely when a traffic tie up will occur.  Motorists stop to see them knuckle down for water or stretch for the suspended food.  […]

An old drive-in, with the sound box unclipped from a pole and hung inside the car window by the same clip.  Bodies sitting close as on the huge screen massive images move like elephants in love.  Bodies sitting close is the important element:  the car a mobile motel room with the excuse of a movie.  […]

What should he do with the red paint? Before he took it from the paint store he had thought he wanted the color blue. But then he realized he had no plan for what was going to be done with the paint; so, as he thought about the paint itself in ever more detail, what […]

All the doors of the road are open. Someone must have left them unlocked. Or maybe there is a skeleton key. Or someone was willing to pry them open through unleavened force. No matter. You cannot drive on this road: all its doors are open. For now, I will let the baffled, thirsty commuters ponder […]

Six soldiers sit with their backs to the moon, looking like six chicken legs set out for this Sunday’s afternoon family reunion dinner. Six legs from chickens raised on this very farm; chickens that came when rhythmically called; chickens that received feed from the upturned, folded apron of the plaid family matriarch. Chickens that pulled […]

The ants we found to be the size of house cats. They wore ruts in the land, created virtual canyons, at times encouraged river beds. The enriching surprise was that the aardvarks were the size of garden spiders. One ant could feed an entire clan of fidgeting aardvarks for weeks. Everywhere there were decaying ant […]

You assemble the car out of ordinary things: cabinetry, dining room chairs, a bed worn out, three chickens and an old dog from Henley’s. Its engine is the heart of a bear. You draw the choke and the heart sputters, coughs itself into rhythm, pushes blood into the axles. You proudly slip into the barbed […]

Between us there is notice. A braille of recognition, a mummery of portraiture. You expect cycles of me, rumors of left-handed gods, a great passion for ingestible stones. Mine is the part of meeting expectations. Yet expectations supplely oppress you. And here I am wingless, and for the full moon grieving sinful, rich feathers. Feel […]

I took all the qualities that I thought made up my citizenship and gave them to the mermaid I was secretly in love with. She organized them, and began to apply them to rattling the waves and dividing the sea into houses for the finned and houses for the unfinned. She mocked the water and […]