Krakin-Upa and the Two-Day Poem Contest
Danny slurred “Thor didn’t ‘ave an ax, he ‘ad a hammer!”
General laughter. “Thorax,” someone stressed, “not Thor’s ax.”
We sat, staring at ten words. Such discussion of poetry, that of young
students bearing fortified wine. Splitting time to the very filament.
“Two days? I need two weeks!” Kai complained, nervous.
“I don’t even have an idea.” He fiddled with his absurdly large
belt buckle. Not sure who told him tonight was western themed,
but we all appreciated the comic relief. Geri looked at an article
titled “Ten ways to remind your man that you’re a woman.”
“Wouldn’t one way suffice?” she asked the room with a pelvic thrust.
Wine poured from coffee cup vessel for the fruits of our jubilancy.
Grapes, mainly. Proof that we didn’t need to eat any damn apples.
Chad’s couch, a raw sienna with constellations of maroon drying
(to his chagrin the next morning). Someone turned on South Park.
Gerald explicated a wrench from Chad’s tattered Clue box,
remnant of his childhood, seeking some physical representation.
Some sort of absolute proof that wrench is not only a noun, verb,
but also something less symbolic and more tangible. He flexed it
in the lamplight like a baby testing the tensile strength of a tiny rattle.
“Don’t bother,” Eddy chimed, “it’s just the Matrix.” More laughs.
That’s mostly what we did. More than write, read, eat. We drank,
we laughed. Why do anything else? Who needs a poem on a night
when the room’s ready to erupt with laughter, like Krakin-Upa,
mighty volcano god of the apartments at St. Joseph and First.
Zebulon Huset is a teacher, writer and photographer living in San Diego. His writing has recently appeared in Meridian, The Southern Review, Louisville Review, Fence, Rosebud, Atlanta Review, Texas Review and Fjords Review among others. He publishes a writing prompt blog Notebooking Daily and is the editor of the journal Coastal Shelf.
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