Wolf Eye

Andy Cox

Halloween

Premise: All elephants are self-aware.
Elephants at the Bronx zoo recognize themselves in an 8 x 8 foot mirror.
A female named Babe uses her trunk to touch a red dot that the keepers
painted on her forehead.

Premise: All dead people are not self-aware.
Ghosts do not exist but little sweet goblins inhabit our hearts and homes.

Conclusion: All elephants are not dead people.
Therefore the leaves are yellow and orange and the wind elaborates October 31
while the elephants at the Bronx zoo join “the cognitive elite.” Therefore
the little goblins skip through the wind-swept streets not knowing why these
houses are haunted, houses not haunted by ghosts.

Underpinnings

1.) Down the long hallway are muffled voices of grownups. So long now since I wanted
to go to such murmurs and eavesdrop, to overhear what I am not supposed to hear: the
unimpressed women the overeager men. The grownups will not go home. The grownups
do not know I am listening. The grownups do not know anything

2.) That dog was nothing to me…Cats are just charged particles…I’m making this up as
I go along … I tried to mimic any number of people none of whom I admired … Most
pandered to the present tense at the wedding … Good cheer earned the right to its
underpinnings … We lived in the weather it did not live in us … Someone died … An 11
year-old girl cannot contain her happiness …

3.) A man’s tag says blank: a blank sign informs no one, who drives by with a blank face,
who turns the wheel onto the blank street no one knows his mind being blank. Half of
half of half and so on until you arrive at the smallest half: half for you and half for me.
Cut ten in half. Five is a magic number because someone told me so. This man is half a
man his blank name tag says so.

Andy Cox lives in University City, Missouri. Poems of his appear in Gulf Coast, The Laurel Review, Natural Bridge, Pebble Lake Review, River Styx, Sentence, and Witness, among others. The Equation That Explains Everything has been a finalist in the Four Way Books Intro prize and the Elixir Press poetry prize. contact

 

 
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