DESK

by Koss


  • Stapler shacks up with never-charge crystal in the open drawer; names not important; this is gestalt on my desk

  • Random numbers, 0-77; anyone can guess

  • Send me a job order and I inflate

  • Three green beer cansy empty; two mason jars for class; plastic spoons—oily and translucent red; memory of vegetables; McDonald’s dollar drinks—erect, yet empty

  • M & M’s, peanuts long gone; month-ago Sunday whoopee

  • SQL book topped by dom industrial tape gun, everything a sexual-retiree needs

  • Glasses no longer work but nerd worthy, the new backup drive failed also

  • A dappled jasper skull with healing properties I don’t remember; Cruella’s refuse—once belonged to Max; not a dog in site

  • The modem/router probably ate them; no things know the passkey

  • Candykiller urban toy glow-in-the-dark in box; Max’s gift before she checked out

  • Topped by wax-covered paper clips from the early 70s; Grams: relics of love, but who could tell

  • Music I can’t listen to; George Formby if ukulele could redeem itself; those bitch girls who eschewed melody

  • The Zen of web design from when coding might be transcendental or sublime or just an occupation unrealized

  • Superhero women reside on the top shelf; their waists all too small, but dig their big musculature and tapered ankles; inside asses are kicked and Jack Kirby takes a stab at feminism

  • Empty melatonin; a month’s grateful sleep

  • The hemp oil salve, not a miracle; citron-scented fraud-in-a-can

  • Everything I started and never finished piled on rubberwood; four years before; four years later; before Max; a life does


Koss is a writer and artist with over 150 publications in many journals including Diode Poetry, Kissing Dynamite, Rogue Agent, Bending Genres, Five Points, and others. They won the 2021 Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Award and were nominated for BOTN for poetry and fiction (by Kissing Dynamite and Bending Genres). Find links to recent publications at https://koss-works.com.