Browse: authors: k:

Joy Katz

Packing Tape

Descendant of Puritans, packing tape vouchsafes little intelligence of its overseas journeys. In the desk drawer it's mum,

set to do the job. As my father asks no questions of his breakfast: "It fills the stomach."

Prepare to bind mightily the flaps of your box. (Inside, some fragile thing afloat in shredded paper.)

Slight Pause

5 April 2009
Vol. 9, No. 1
poetry

We looked at each other, then at the plate of tomatoes,

and you said, do we eat them?


Our neighbor was dead. Fallen over in her front hall.

She had brought us green tomatoes.

Crispers

Pull one off the track and you'll see: getting it back into the fridge is like pushing a wheelchair uphill in a stiff wind. We had eleven refrigerators in eleven houses in eleven cities. Now we have only their crispers, shaming us with bits of our old rind.

42opus is an online magazine of the literary arts.

copyright © 2001-2008
XHTML // CSS // 508