Robert Frede Kenter

wind forces the door open. inside is a gutted room. is there some
deception? a story recovered from the basement of desire. in the open
hallway that gives hope of an embrace, a black spider is spinning a web.
at the centre, the red ventricle of pain, hatred resonates
powder-blue, like a fly’s wing. I could never separate the
chosen from the condemned. the heritage of my family, the white bathtub
with the perpetual ring of dirt, neither mother nor I could completely scour
clean. all of the children left town following a parade of rats. in a photograph
the police sent to me months later Father stood to attention like a statue. His
pants were about to fall down he’d lost so much weight fasting to prove a
point concerning the necessity of facing adversity discovering the spiritual
path of hunger. He had scrawled on the back of a photograph: The doctors all
shake their heads stethoscope (phalluses) hanging
from their coats. I see a swimming pool drained of water. a young man
sits on the ledge, an earlier version of myself, a young-starved
Frank Sinatra crooning. He opens a can of beans with vaudevillian flourish.
Across the street an ice truck is leaving a warehouse filled with farmed raw
trout piled up rows upon rows . Shake hands with the end of a dream, here. A
sensation tingles at edges of my fingers. Fire, not smoke no explanations. The
steps are moss covered. I descend from here into the crowded reception.

Robert Frede Kenter is a pushcart-nominated poet, prose writer, playwright, editor, visual artist, award-winning book designer, and the EIC/publisher of Ice Floe Press (www.icefloepress.net). Robert’s work explores images and juxtapositions of illness, social unrest, interiority and dream, transformation, trauma, visions and nightmares. Robert lives with ME/CFS, studied art and performance at Antioch College and  experimental theatre with companies incl. The Wooster Group and the Talking Band — Robert’s art works are collected internationally. Recently published in: Otoliths, Anthropocene, Street Cake, Scissors and Spackle, Olney Magazine, Fevers of the Mind, talking about strawberries all of the time, Watch Your Head, Storms Journal, Ice Floe Press, Feral, Mooky Chick, and many other venues, in print and on-line. In recent anthologies incl: Glisk and Glimmer (Sidhe Press), Recalibrating the Pain Scale (Olney Books), In-Flight (Black Bough), Seeing in Tongues (Steel Incisor), The Book of Penteract (Penteract Press), and numerous others. A VISPO collection, EDEN, is available from Ice Floe Press and Rare Swan Press.