King Grossman is an award-winning poet, novelist, and writer of short prose. His poems and short prose have appeared or are forthcoming in The Round, Licking River Review, Crack the Spine, Forge, Tiger’s Eye, DMQ Review, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Qwerty, Burningword, Ignatian, Drunk Monkeys, The Paragon Journal, Pennsylvania English, SLAB, Slag Review, Midwest Quarterly, The Borfski Review, Carbon Culture Review, and Nebo. Letters To Alice, his current novel, in 2017 received The Independent Press Award as the Distinguished Favorite in Visionary Fiction, was a Finalist for Literary Fiction in the National Indie Excellence Awards, received the Gold Medal for Inspirational/Visionary Fiction from the Global Ebook Awards, and won two Royal Dragonfly Book awards, for Literary Fiction and Cover Design. A longtime fugitive from the worlds of Wall Street and Capitol Hill, these days he also regularly participates in nonviolent public actions to address climate change, economic injustice, institutionalized racism, inhumane immigration policy, oppressive violence and militarism. He lives in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California with his wife, Lisa, dog, Bogart, and sun conure parrot, Sunny.

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Two Bigger Birds Getting Smaller Fly Towards New Names

Awake in the treetops
To a couple of redheaded
Acorn woodpeckers,
Floating with beats of wings
Every now and then, here and there:

The yawn of Big Sur
Stitches him with leaves of forever,
Time it takes to in an instant drop
All angels and demons flat on their rosy asses,

Thump! Down below
In the vast ocean calm,
By some kind of craziness
Answers every question; later
At night waters of freedom dark
And dotted with stars’ penlights,

All the matches struck
Out of the old book,
Two new books given over
Without charge and just for the asking
From the kindly woman
Behind the checkout counter at Rite Aid Pharmacy

So that through the wispy moments of morning
He can continue firing a Christ candle
To hold its embers throughout the onrushing day for
Attach-detach…attach-detach…attach-detach…
A madman and a poet clearing the sightlines
All the way over to his twin soul,
As she swoops poetic in her understory,

Him darting through tangled branches
To reach her, to fly beside her,
Kiss beaks together
The first time they alight
And stand still (continued)
(Grossm

Like nothing as much as everything
Rotates on the wheel,
No different really
Than these two California scrub jays
Once called King and Lisa.

 

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More about the author:

King is the host of Artivism-which explores the intersection of writers and artists with social justice activism-on Your Town television program broadcast throughout the Monterey Peninsula, California area. All royalties from King’s work are contributed to Occupy the Word Foundation, a nonprofit organization King founded to offer writers residencies and publishing opportunities to fresh, radical writers of poetry and fiction.