In America, 
with all those firecrackers they put up your ass 
to give you pep and courage...
Henry Miller has just reminded me 
that I’ve missed my colonoscopy this summer 
and I interrupt him 
to disclose that I’ve put my mother’s health 
above my own 

At the last moment 
she decided to flee Boca Raton, Florida 
where obnoxious, old New York Jews go to die 
and, with my help, relocate on a mountain peak 
14,000 feet high 
west of Denver 
in the Rockies 

so her soul 
when it departs 
will not run like sludge 
down a sewage pipe 
but instead will rise like an eagle 
in an updraft

—Excerpted and rearranged as a poem by the author from a micro-fiction entitled “14,000 Feet,” which was previously published in 1947: a literary journal (14 June 2017)

Publisher’s Note: Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (Obelisk Press, 1934): “How could I have foreseen, in America, with all those firecrackers they put up your ass to give you pep and courage, that the ideal position for a man of my temperament was to look for orthographic mistakes?”

Bio: Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois