Carol Graser

The Appendix

The Appendix believed she was part
of the large intestine. She didn’t have
an origin story. At digestive
tract meetings, she dangled silently
sometimes they forgot to leave her a chair
She had ideas for departmental
improvements but knew she needed
more clout before she could speak
At parties she hung at the edges
of conversations, contributed comments
that no one bothered to hear

She was in love with the liver
but who wasn’t, that dark whale
of an organ. You are beautiful
and vital, she told herself
They would be lost without you
She wasn’t getting any younger
She knew that

She threw herself into the task
of harboring digestive bacteria
She harbored impeccably
She harbored with zeal
until she harbored the wrong crowd
No one answered her calls to 911
That’s just typical, she said
in her first bitter tone. She swelled
in self pity and found comfort
in her smarmy new friends
Everyone’s got some good in them
she rationalized
making room for a few more

When finally someone noticed
when the bright light of attention
held her in its glare she capitulated
almost violently. I’ll be good, she sobbed
I didn’t mean it, she pleaded
But the handcuffs were already clamped
to her wrists. The large intestine
pulled back from the commotion
the bad taste. I knew she’d be dragged
off someday, whispered the colon
as her wails faded out in the distance
and a thick hush fell over them all


What if

Emily Dickinson’s rise
to poetic stardom was a reality
TV show? Think a Victorian house
with staid, heavily placed furniture
a white figure wisps across a distant
hallway, cut to a bee hovering
studiously over a patch of red clover

Characters will include an absolute
silence, a wind, sometimes soft
sometimes wailing, death, and
a rotating cast of flowers and insects

Emily herself stipulates
we can only film her in passing

Each confessional is a poem
ink spreading on paper
abandoned in random spots
discovered by the camera
lying amid, say, the debris
of a finished breakfast


Now is the Time

Let the patriarchs heave and explode in their
last gasp of insecure power; they are dying.

Their hearts are beating out of sync
with our future; they are rotting.

Their grip among the boulders, their anchorage is slipping.
Now is the time to witness that last vigorous rush of activity.

In their gushing love for profit they are rushing about
filling their near infinite golden cups and some

soon tomorrow they’ll be buried. We’ll stand at their graves
and murmur about their just-days-ago revival.

The good brown earth will swallow them.
The fertile meal from their bones will feed nations.

When their houses are cleared, their furniture repurposed,
their medals melted back to pure, once we’ve sorted

and recycled and dumped and burned and donated
and there is nothing left of those fetid foundations

we will regain ground. We need sunflowers eating
their toxin. We need new fields of varied wildflowers,
we need the jump of meaty rabbits, the thick hum of bees,
the crazy lives of dragonflies darting through our air.

We who have been coddled and bathed in honeyed water
we who have been outcast and neglected, who in our shunned
state have reveled in resilience, we tell the ones still fighting
the war is resolved. The patriarch is mortal and dead.

This is the rebuilding. We are connected
by the same color of our blood. We are connected
by the same air in our lungs, by the bone in our precious skulls.
We are connected by our same mouths born rooting
for the same sweet milk.


About the Author

Carol Graser hosts a monthly poetry series at Saratoga Spring’s legendary Caffe Lena on the first Wednesday of every month and has performed her work at various events and venues around NYS. Her work has been published in many literary journals, recently in Devilfish Review, Punch Drunk Press, Trailer Park Quarterly and Minute Magazine. She is the author of the poetry collection, The Wild Twist of Their Stems (Foothills Publishing).

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