Scholar (by Mitchell Grabois)

Scholar

In the café argument
Sara protests, I’m a decorated Sylvia Plath scholar!

Decorated by who and with what, Claire asks

Out of work window dressers from Cleveland Ohio
using crêpe paper and
Purple Hearts thrown away in protest, I suggest

Sara is turning purple with rage
Fine! Ridicule me! I’ve been ridiculed all my life!
I’m going to go kill myself!
She rushes from the table
out the door of the café

Now you’ve done it, says Sara’s husband
blowing some powdered sugar off a beignet



* * * * *

Mitchell Krochmalnik Grabois was born in the Bronx and now splits his time between Denver and a one-hundred-and-twenty-year-old one room schoolhouse in Riverton Township, Michigan. His short fiction, poetry and columns have appeared in hundreds of literary magazines in the U.S. and internationally. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, most recently for his story “Purple Heart,” published in The Examined Life in 2012, and for his poem “Birds,” published in The Blue Hour in 2013. Grabois’s novel, Two-Headed Dog, is available for all e-readers for 99 cents. Click for Kindle. Click for Nook. Click for the print edition (paperback, $6.65).