A Day at the Office

by Mark Kerstetter

Boggled.
Paper stacked beneath a box of pencils,
paint hardened in tubes,
images not rendered fill mental
picture frames like engorged
intestines.
A perimeter of nails, now rusty,
encapsulates the unreliable frames.
A pummeled palmetto bug drags itself
out of the dust only to
halt in the dead
center where
apples tumble
back onto
the tree.

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Mark Kerstetter steals time away from restoring an old house in Florida to write and make art out of wood salvaged from demolition sites. His poems and stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Jerry Jazz Musician, Unlikely 2.0, Evergreen Review and other journals. He is the former poetry editor of Escape into Life and blogs as The Bricoleur