Poetry By Toby Grossman

        Judith Jackson CC



Amarok

We drink sweat
-licked beers, three
of us. The boy with an axe
for a father, the girl that grew
into a deadly nightshade,
and the child-woman
with twig-pricked lips.
The rehab has a strict
substance abuse rule,
but for a brief
slice of fresh fruit,
we are alive.

Mouths shaped around
arrows we sweet
tip and toss.
Targets a bit blurred
by the alcohol
but our aim still practiced
from a lifetime
of denial.

My tongue gold
pierced and silent,
teeth-ivory fashioned
into armor.
Perhaps power
is a matter of how much
one doesn’t have to say
to be known.

Sometimes I forget
how calloused
irony-hewn hands
can be and I rip off
my skin hoping someone will
caress the lantern-bone.
I’ve broken most of my ribs that way.

The axe that is the boy’s
father wielded in the shadow
of his palm like a cool
weapon.
The poison in the girl’s
flower a velvet blue
-blood.

The twigs
of the child-woman’s
mouth sprouted
glass leaves.

After the short reprieve
from pounded iron,
we are once again,
sculptures.
Like this, empty
bottles, we retreat
into our lead pasts.
And the wolves,
they welcome us back,
gladly.


​

Toby Grossman is a poet exploring the inherent paradoxes in our absurd existence. She wrestles with scale differences between the smallness of our blue dot home and the largeness of human grief. She often writes through the lens of her experiences with mental illness and alienation. Her work has recently appeared in Kissing Dynamite and Feral Journal.