Alex M. Frankel


The Ecstasies of Sir Knut 7-Around

His wealth rises on scum everlasting.  
He sees through the mind of a mathematical star 
and so everywhere grow lady trees.
He’s batty raising seven daughters
and adorning his wife Morbida Susy.
His face of uncurated skin with a mouth at its center
has no other features but half an eyelid.
The face of a rejected shoulder.
When he steps to the right of his cypress
countless human teeth blow hectic in the wind
and bite into many a passer-by.
There’s something sepulchral about his happiness.
With a half eyelid, he holds underlings suspended 
so that a building’s windows can’t stop discussing.
His sweat flows upward in a hundred arrows.
With one frown, he can destroy stocks or crops,
but only after a blistering night’s rest.
I love his face when it falls, and his one lid,
unlike the lid of anyone else 
when it attempts to shut and get sleep
and then succeeds in “soul”-enhancing slumber.
Like me, he’s a skull’s son,
like me, he throws ultraviolet depressions
so that the outer circle of his world wraps wounded
yet the idea of a priest makes him shudder-scared.
Unlike me, he’s not getting old.
“Abyss yourself,” he chuckles every time envy wins
and I try to slay his meager body dead.
I’ll always be a backseat assistant,
his bald pate will always celebrate riches.
At night I’m in charge of his withered arms.
I soak them in painful towels.
If he scowls, it rains pesticides, but if he laughs
it’s like jasmine outside his bay window
waiting for daylight’s approval.  



Sermon of the Silentiary 

My clothes walked down to the beach
looking to toss and maybe to flutter,
my clothes made of alabaster and pearls
and faithless foundations
went down to the beach and shivered.
Dwarves marched near them bratty and weak. 

The ocean’s water foamed restfully.
Everyone avoided my unruly clothes
that held a glass of syrup to the light.
“Hey look it’s dolphins out there” said a dwarf.
“Those are pirates dumbass” said his friend.
“This’ll be our first hurricane” observed a third.
All sang the urine song.

Nuns came to batter the dwarves,
a real-life calamity
because the nuns had the eyes of stepmothers.
My clothes undressed themselves
there in front of the nuns and the dwarves
and the KFC that overlooked and oversaw everything.
Alabaster garments flew in the breeze
and so did sapphire socks and a miracle beanie
until the single glass of syrup hung suspended.

Nuns shooed every soul away and fled.
In the KFC authorities dialed urgent care.
No hint of my clothes in the first wind.
A thousand storks washed up lifeless
but just one pair of eyebrows saw fit to rise
as if in sprightly comment. 
The syrup guzzled in adoration. 



Rounds of Tiredness 

To ask a Sunday if it will ever return…
it cannot or will not say it won’t. 
To ask a Chinese elm outside these ruins,
why we were thrown into such a futility of lore…
it shrugs, as if in deference to lightning.    
To ask Dionysus the Unbelievable 
what he does about the irksome dancers and athletes
who have wounded many of our dead
with a thousand lessons and a hundred precepts…
he just leers mischievously. 

To pay a silver visit to Txhua Bloin
who died for life after a deadly race,
her fractures and teeth forgotten.
Within an assault of road lights
her water-raft drips and drops,
almost no poppies grow inside it.
To note her whips and beauty fingers,
how all day she gives birth and plays the balalaika.
To ask her to please open her book
and finally say how and why we woke up here
skinny, burned, stupid, shunned.
She births seven skeleton-babes, declares:
I know for a fact everyone’s first days will be sad
but beyond that I cannot claim to know.
I’d ask the opinion of the stars
but they’re a bunch of fraudsters, 
they’re time without a head, space without a hand.
I sense skepticism all round, I too was skeptical,
but Tuesday will roll by as surely as
it follows Monday, and like clockwork 
unremember itself unfairly.
Welcome to a brutalist cloister devoid of clarity!

Her wig collapses,
her offspring drift away, a chorus of hot air balloons.
To try to shake her hand would be folly
for she only offers a sliver of a horse’s hand,
baleful and porous. 

Alex M. Frankel is a Southern California writer who left Spain in the 1990s to settle in Los Angeles, where he writes plays and hosts a poetry series. For ten years he wrote book reviews for The Antioch Review, until it closed down due to Covid-19. Sometimes he publishes under the name "Alejo Rovira Goldner." His new story collection is Flame at Door and Raisin.

 
 

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