1.

My lover rides her bike through the wind and rain. Her head is shaved on one side. The hair on the other is jet black and hangs long, wet and stringy. Rain beads on her bright red lips as on a car recently polished. Her eyes are black. She grips the handlebars tight and pedals hard.

2.

I worked in a state mental hospital. Now I work in a Nursing Home. My next job will be in a school for juvenile delinquents.

3.

She wears a blood red scarf and looks like a gypsy who lives in a camp behind a stark apartment building in Salamanca, Spain, home of the Pontifical University, whose power she neutralizes with evil intent.

4.

Snow 323 has fallen. Canada repulses me like an electro-magnet. I keep taking my pills to keep me from despair. I keep using Unguentine for my skin condition. I wear a back brace to keep me upright. I go to church to keep me upright.

5.

On her forearm is a tattoo, a symbol she designed herself, a planet spinning anarchically. Next to the symbol are words in no language known to man. She tells me they are Portuguese. I know they’re not.

6.

A Mini-Cooper advertisement shows their little car slaloming through acrylic, creating eight Pollard paintings in two seconds. Mini-Cooper asks: Who wants to be normal?

7.

She pedals fast through wind and rain.

Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois has had over fourteen-hundred of his poems and fictions appear in literary magazines in the U.S. and abroad. He has been nominated for numerous prizes, and was awarded the 2017 Booranga Writers’ Centre (Australia) Prize for Fiction. 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. To read more of his work, Google Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois. He lives in Denver, Colorado, USA.