MOOSE ALLEY

John Grey

The road is a slaughterhouse

on this fine spring morning,

an array of squashed squirrels,

blindsided raccoons, smooshed possums,

even a deer half-buried in a ditch.

Man has been through in

his four-wheeled killing machines

and culled the local wildlife.

In the hunting stakes,

one steering wheel

is worth ten high-powered rifles.

Even a crow is splattered.

Flight couldn’t save it.

Not the way cars fly around here.

Farther along, I see a rescue vehicle,

and two tow trucks,

one hauling away a dead moose,

the other, a cratered car.

In the game of life,

this is a tie.

But there are no extra innings.

mage: Dwight Burdette Wikimedia Commons

THE LAW

John Grey

He’s a cop, she says.

Her husband,

the man she lives with,

who shares her bed,

who’s the father of the child

she’s expecting in the spring.

He’s involved in everything

from fraud to robbery,

rape to murder.

He’s been trained in 

counter-terrorism and surveillance

and he can sniff out drugs 

almost as efficiently 

as the German shepherd 

that’s been assigned to work with him.

He brings his work home, she says.

Who else but her is hugged and kissed

because they just might be

the only honest, good-hearted person

left in the city.

He sees criminals everywhere

but in her eyes.

And they can’t go anywhere

without him bringing his revolver along.

When they huddle close,

it feels like a tumor in his chest.

But someone has to deal with

the vicious, the vile, 

the pathetic and the petty politics

and still find a way 

to come home to her each night. 

Only she knows who that someone is.

Image Harry Rajchgot (2016)

TRICKS

John Grey

Pick a card.
Any card.
Let me guess.
It’s the sunlit oak trunk
of Canadian forests.
No wait,
I see red-shelled bedbugs
and the suit…
the flag of storms.
Now put it back
among the tender people
and the loudmouths,
the revolutionaries
and the computers.
Let me shuffle.
Pick another card.
It’s the black misted canyon
of New York hotels.
Am I right?
Stop shaking your head like that.
I know it’s thousands of people in pain
of the metal finger cymbals.
I’m sorry.
You were expecting
the ten of clubs or something.
But I’m not a magician.
You don’t even need
to pick a card.
I can tell you it’s
the penumbra of reckless cancers
or the weakened eye
of Capitalism’s forefathers.
Okay, no more tricks.
I’ll just hand you
the last thing I wrote about you.
No, don’t shuffle it.
Don’t ask me to pick a card.
If you know it’s the
white-capped waters
of love long passed,
then what’s left for me to say?

photo by Harry Rajchgot