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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Something Like Finding Obscure Figures In That Image Puzzle Inside That Magazine While At The Doctor’s Waiting Room

silver blanket sky knotted and never contained
holds at bay every manifesto for feverish spandex
unfurled at the band shell of black jade
Bjork onstage in a peasant dress and shackles
the prisoners are not the ones behind steel bars
fish are underwater fish are underwater
i can only see them with snorkel gear on
all there is nearby is a locket absent any chain
freed slaves in captivity or not connect dots
water rushing through the dream stalkers
fortnight of low-hanging fruit and snug underwear
the middle finger gets heavy on this one key
over and over dystopian novels miss roses
roses roses roses please some roses
flamingos appropriated before the Everglades
got lost to Anita Bryant and the clodhoppers
of buttered toast and not-tattooed forearms
clean as a whistle use of sawdust pellets
for absorbing moisture in the compost bin
pale pail pall pawpaw powwow
drumbeats without a saxophone
never move your blue eyes off mine
or the loneliness of that one and only moment
jasmine wafted like flying lace butterflies
the corpses of Muammar al-Gaddafi and Helen Keller
finally parted from any form of dark sunglasses
we know why but forget before the woodbine
rented the bungalow from a noodle vendor
or a clown that never made anyone cry
just sat there in the lotus position
hoping Janis Joplin was still alive
her pain or something else entirely
reordering all the words
until passion matters more than thought
the white female cop killed the black man
in his own apartment just because a huckleberry
never got plucked from the window washers
voyeurism of selected kidney beans and phonies
always direct your attention over way behind the rostrum
and watch tiny bubbles erase all fear
a blow stick moved gently through the air
singing fa la la la la
into Clark Kent’s herringbone sweater

 

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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.