Contributor: Frank Grigonis

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You leapt
Into my life
Like a dolphin
Bursting up
Through the ice
Of a dark,
Frozen ocean
Into the warm
Waiting arms
Of the sun


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Frank Grigonis writes poetry and fiction. His work has appeared in Leaves-of-Ink, Nerve Cowboy, PANK, Whiskey Island, Every Day Fiction, The Horror Zine and elsewhere. He is currently seeking an agent or publisher for his novel MAIL ORDER ANNIE.

Contributor: Frank Grigonis

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I could take you to other countries,
but they would only be ordinary
places like France, Japan, or Spain,
places filled with typical stops
and sights: Eiffel Tower at dawn,
Cherry Blossoms of Kyoto by
afternoon, and crumbling, Spanish
castles by night.

The people in these places
would be typical too.
Most toss in beds they wish
were bigger and sleep through
lives they can only dream
were better.

The majority of the animals
there, like most sentient beings
everywhere, suffer too,
while the same sagging stars
look down on it all without
twinkling or blinking, until
one by one their lights go dark
before they fall.

But the places you take me
whenever I see you
are far from the ordinary
stops and sights.

In your anime eyes
this bleak world
appears shiny and new,
spilling over with childish
delights, like laughing, blue
unicorns running through
flowering forests where
musical instruments grow
on technicolor trees and
breathe soothing melodies
into the perfumed breeze,
where each moment brims over
with unbridled bliss
like the shimmering summer night
of my first kiss,
where no creature is sad or
suffers at all,
where each star shines forever
and never need
fall.


- - -

Contributor: Frank Grigonis

- -
When I was a
little kid
I’d walk around
aimlessly
and pick up random
pieces of paper
off the ground,
like receipts
for minor purchases
and discarded
burger wrappers.
I’d turn them over
searching for
a message
that might
lead me to some
long-buried treasure
or maybe even answer
one of the questions
then plaguing me,
like
what should I say to
the beautiful blonde-
haired girl
who lived on my street?
I also hoped to find
a word of
encouragement
from God
specifically addressed
to me
by name.
That would have helped
because even then
I was beginning to feel
that life didn’t make sense
or often lead
to happy endings
like in the movie
that played only
in the theater
of my mind.
In that imaginary film
one day I picked up
a candy bar wrapper
from the street, then
turned it inside out
and saw the message:
“I Love You, Frank”
written in
pink ink
and signed
by the same
beautiful blonde-haired
girl who lived
on my street.
But I never really
found that message
and it wasn’t until
junior high that
I finally
got to the point
where I no longer believed that
random trash from the road
might speak to me
and change my life.
Then one cold day
on the school bus
a dark-haired girl
I’d never seen before
walked up to me
and shoved a piece
of paper into
my coat pocket,
then walked away
without saying a word.
The paper said, “I like you”
and even though
the girl who’d written it
wasn’t the blonde-haired girl,
she was kind
of cute,
and I was moved
by her bravery
and the message.
So I looked for her
on the bus after that
and around school,
but I never
saw her again.
This only reinforced
my belief that life
was random and
didn’t make much sense,
and since then
most of it hasn’t.
But still
I remember
that magical message
she shoved into
my coat pocket
thirty years ago,
and if I could
I’d stick
this poem
in her pocket
right now.


- - -
Frank Grigonis likes paper.

Contributor: Frank Grigonis

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I’m reading this
poetry e-zine
when an ad
on the left-hand side
of the site
catches my eye.
The ad features
four Ukrainian girls
ranging in ages
from 19
to 30--
all plums
all more
than capable
of inspiring armies
of love poets,
the kind who
like to rhyme, and
this ad drags me back
to my flowery
love poems days,
when I once responded
to a similar ad
in the back of a
print magazine,
which led me to write
to a curvy, petite Ukrainian
with mesmerizing,
almond-shaped eyes.
This all happened after
a bad breakup
with a very material
American girl,
when I was both
young and
a long way
from wise,
so we exchanged letters
until finally
I sprang for
expensive telephone
conversations
between her and I
with a lady translator
who worked for that
Ukrainian Angels
Introductions Agency
who stunned me plenty
after one such call
after my charming “angel”
had already said goodbye.
The translator told me
That while my picture
looked pretty good
and I had an ok job,
the girl I’d been
just talking to, Annie,
was among the prettiest
in the entire catalogue
and that a girl “knows
her worth”
and she (the translator)
was only telling me
all of this, off the record,
because I seemed like such a
“nice guy.” So I listened
to her go on about
how all of their girls
are really
looking for a man
who makes at least
80-100 grand a year,
which was about
four times what I
made at the time. I laughed
and said, “You might as well
just put a price tag on them then.”
She surprised me by responding:
“God already has.”

So in my next letter
I told my Ukrainian
How much I really earned
and sent her a poem.
It was kind of a test.
She wrote back saying,
“Come and see me in Kiev,
my love.”
So I spent my savings
and flew to see that
she was as feminine
and charming as she’d been
In her letters and
even more lovely
in the flesh
than her photos.
It proceeded like a dream:
walking, talking (she knew
some English), and laughing
with Annie up and down
those cobblestone roads,
past colorful building,
and hand in hand
into historic churches.
Then she introduced me to
her friend, a tall, thin
blonde, but without Annie’s
magic, Asiatic eyes.
Later at the hotel
I booked two rooms:
one for me
and one for them,
but the night was young
so they came up to
my room with a bottle
of Vodka, and we all drank
and I drank more
because I’d read that
in the Ukraine
it’s considered an insult
not to drink
when offered, and
I vaguely remember kissing
Annie while her friend
rubbed my chest
until I agreed to take
them both to some
“disco” even though
I could barely stand.
They walked on either side
of me while I steadied myself
by putting an
arm around
each of them.
We were
barely outside
the hotel when
two guys wearing
leather jackets
started yelling something
in Ukrainian,
and before I knew it
they were on me.
I tried to defend myself,
but the vodka made that
even more hopeless
than it would have otherwise
been.
After the first few
hard blows
to my face,
I was stunned
and couldn’t even
raise my fists,
but the blows kept coming
for what seemed like
a long time,
until both of my
attackers finally got
bored.
Annie helped me
back to my room
where she phoned room service
for a frozen steak
to put on the swollen
left side
of my face.
I knew it was
pretty bad when I saw
the look of sheer horror
on the Lady
who brought
the steak.
Annie stayed and
tended to my wound,
but it was to be
our last night together.
In the morning I
told her I loved her
and wanted to
marry her,
but she just sighed
and said maybe.
I only found out later
that her friend spent
that night with
one of my attackers
in the other room
I’d rented,
and that Annie
had other admirers
and visitors.
After I arrived home,
I wrote to her
one last time.
She never wrote back, and
the swelling
on the left side
of my face
never went down
all the way.
Now 12 years later,
when I see an ad
featuring Urainian girls
on my favorite
poetry e-zine,
I have to remind myself,
“Not this time.”
And I try to stay away
from flowery poems
that rhyme.


- - -
Frank Grigonis writes. He is currently working on a novel.

Contributor: Frank Grigonis

- -
I was ready
to start at the bottom,
but I didn’t know
I’d be wiping
the bottom
of each and every resident
at Green Acres Nursing Home,
during the graveyard-
shift.

Still, I was grateful
for that job
because it got me
out from under
my father’s roof
where I lived as quietly
as a housecat,
but not
quietly enough
for the old man,
who felt that everyone
under his roof
should sleep and wake
according to his schedule.

His mail-order,
third wife
seemed to agree
with him, and
went to bed
exactly when he did
every night.

In the upstairs bedroom,
I’d stay up and read
or write with pen and paper
because the electric typewriter
kept the old man awake.
But still he complained
that he could hear me
creaking the floorboards
while walking to and from
the downstairs bathroom
two or three times
a night. So I started to piss
in empty plastic bottles
and then
screw the caps back on,
but the old man complained
about the “smell”
of both the urine
and the air freshener
I’d spray afterwards.

I thought it was strange
that my father was so
obsessed with smells.
He was the same guy
who used to proudly fart
then laugh about it
in his blue Dodge
with my little brother
and me in it
when we were
still young and dumb
enough to go
on Sunday drives with him
after he left my mother
to shack up with
my aunt.
And when my brother,
then seven or eight,
would fart in the car
just like dad did,
the old man would scream and
threaten to stuff him
in the trunk
until my brother cried.

And our father chain smoked
in that old car
just like he did
in his house,
but if I so much as tried
to microwave a tv dinner
or even a sixty second
cheese sandwich
for myself
in his kitchen,
he’d rant and rave
about the fumes
and the smell
seeping into his wallpaper.

Even so I was
a little stunned
when I tried to bring
a dying kitten
I’d found outside
into his vast basement,
and the old man
wouldn’t hear of it.

So I took that job
as an orderly,
rented a small room,
and ignored the telephone
when my father’s number appeared
on the answering machine.

I lived blissfully alone,
though the job was tough
at times
to take.
There was Ethel in Ward B,
who regularly pleaded
for someone
to please kill her,
and there was Gunter,
who’d tear off his wet diaper,
then throw it against the wall
and cry,
when we were too busy
to get to him
in time,
and there was meek Edith,
who got assaulted by mad Marco,
because she wouldn’t give him
her apple pie at lunchtime,
and there was Tony, who dressed
up every Sunday for visitors
from his past who
never arrived.

I talked with,
learned from,
and cared for them all
as best as I could
for three years,
and I earned a good rep there.
The director even called me
St. Francis--
and only half-jokingly.

I still can see
the faces of the residents, hear the things they
confided in me, and see the flickers
and embers of hope, but mostly
anguish in their eyes.
I saw so much suffering
in so many pairs of eyes
marooned in as many
forlorn, wrinkled faces,
that I thought I’d mastered
the art of compassion--
until one day,
years later,
after I decided
to pick up the ringing phone
and heard my father,
by then quite old,
propose that I should
move back in with him
and take care of him,
in exchange for that
one year
when I lived
in his house
and he
took care of me.
He said it so seriously
that I had to laugh
and couldn’t stop
laughing--
so hard in fact
that the tears came
and flowed,
until finally,
after the last laugh
I wiped the tears
from my face
with my sleeve,
then hung up on him
for the last time,
as he puffed away
on his cigarette,
in his house,
to contemplate
his perfectly
undisturbed,
and silent
fate.


- - -
Frank Grigonis started at the bottom during the Kali Yuga.

Contributor: Frank Grigonis

- -
there are days hot enough
to send beer bottles
into cracked walls
and cracked skulls
and policemen
through the doors
of the working poor
without air conditioning

days hot enough
to spark curses upwards
into the searing sky
from even the mouths
of the meek
and the mild

and on these days
it becomes clear
that our sun
is no smiley-faced
friend

but instead
it's an interrogation lamp
scorching our faces
as it searches out
every blotch, wrinkle
and lie

it's a mad, hot
irradiating furnace
the mother that gave
unholy birth
to the mad, hot hells
where the many
live and writhe

it's a swirling ball
of cancer
for which there's
no cure
except for the one
that will come
when it finally dies
in about 5 billion years
according to our
comfortable, air-conditioned
men of science


- - -
Frank Grigonis writes poetry, short fiction, and is working on a novel. His work has been published in literary magazines and e-zines: Whiskey Island, Snow Monkey, Nerve Cowboy, Blank Gun Silencer, The Horror Zine, Every Day Fiction, Leaves of Ink, Farther Stars, and others.

Contributor: Frank Grigonis

- -
The beauty of every human race
is held there within her face
When she dances she spins
the pinwheels of passion
But lovelier still
is her compassion
for the creatures of
this whirling Earth
for the creatures of
this aching Earth


- - -
Frank Grigonis writes poetry, short fiction, and is working on a novel. His work has been published in literary magazines and e-zines: Whiskey Island, Snow Monkey, Nerve Cowboy, Blank Gun Silencer, The Horror Zine, Every Day Fiction, Leaves of Ink, Farther Stars, and others.

Contributor: Frank Grigonis

- -
I’m almost never in sync
with the buzzing swarm
of humanity.
On Facebook today
someone shared a story
comparing two past presidents:
Jimmy Carter and George W.,
intending to show
in stark contrast
what a fool Bush is
for painting pictures
of his dog,
while Saint Jimmy
selflessly devotes himself
to managing elections
for Lybians
and building what look like
big birdhouses
for poor families.
Well, when old W.
was president
I had almost nothing
good to say
about him
and still don’t,
but I like that he paints
pictures of his dog.
It shows that
he’s at least
nominally artistic, and
part human
after all.
As for old Jimmy,
I don’t see
why the Lybians,
or anyone else
need him around
to oversee their elections;
and while it’s a
nice thing
to build homes
for the poor,
isn’t it ultimately
a father’s job
to provide for
his own family
in accordance with
the judicial decree
first handed down
by Mother Nature herself,
the original judge
of all?
The very same one
who rendered this opinion:
no one really
does anything selflessly.
We do what we do,
whether it’s painting dogs,
helping the poor,
or writing poems,
because it makes us
feel better;
so go ahead
and disagree
in the comments section
below this poem,
and don’t click “like”,
it won’t bother me
because I like to make
my own buzzing sounds
quite apart from
the swarm.


- - -
Frank likes to buzz.