SurVision Magazine
An international online magazine
that publishes Surrealist poetry in English.
Issue Fifteen
ROYAL RHODES
Cabinet
They constructed me
as an apothecary's cabinet,
a right-angled maze
of a hundred drawers,
each perfectly aligned.
The design consisted
of labeled compartments
like some surrealist torso.
In one unforgiving box
a peach pit resembling
an almond's dimpled shell.
In another a wish-bone,
tied with a red thread.
Two identical keys,
neither of which opened
the same closed lock.
Another housed a nest
to a spool of paper
on which a run-on word
came undone, at a touch.
One held a rubbed stone
a night visitor owned.
A drawer, pulled open,
resembled a smiling
open-mouth wooden face.
Each slid easily in place,
like your hand slipping
on my bare knee, sweating
as we drove where
no doors would shut.
Royal Rhodes is a retired educator from Ohio, USA. His poems appear in The Lyric, Ekstasis, Last Stanza, Dreich, Snakeskin, Seventh Quarry, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, and The Montreal Review.
