Two Poems by Clayton Krollman
/Feed the Tiger
Clayton Krollman
I have taken a picture with a tiger, it’s true. Arranging a meeting with one involves a moderate amount of luxury. This doesn’t make me brave, so don’t ask. I keep trying to get to the beach, or at least beach-adjacent. There is a lot of pretending going on. I’ve been overdramatizing the bad omens lately. Look at all this stuff on the Internet—anybody can monetize a hobby. These days they’ll teach anybody how to fake a death; the faked deaths are very elaborate and come in threes. Do you actually think the Segway guy was murdered by a Segway? And where is the footage of that rich lawyer-type crashing forty stories through the window he was trying to prove indestructible? I have never been eaten by a tiger, though I am hoping for an awards show on the pretending. Soon, somebody smarter than me will invent a compliment machine that actually works, and barely anybody will do anything anymore.
I Go Into My Head and Emerge with a Lamp
Clayton Krollman
The tower tells lies. In the tower, I go through rooms upon rooms of mostly velvet. The velvet is not always blue. Since the tower contains everything inside it, I name names as I go: here is the room where the tiger was shown privately to twin sisters, here is the room where the two boys fought to the death. These things have happened more than once, and not just in here. There are rooms for those other times too. Awhile back, I passed the room full of stacks and stacks of complaints. I saw from one of many doorways, the back of a figure checking for rain—indoors!—and a statue of a man with a hole straight through his head. I did not go put my eye against it to check for a hidden note because the tower tells lies: I want to see a tiger and so there is a tiger to see. I go up into the tower’s inscrutable brain. The spiral staircase is draped in velvet that is both blue and not blue. The fight over the lamp is with a perfect copy of myself while the tiger watches.
Clayton Krollman is a graduate of University of Maryland, where he received the Jiménez-Porter Literary Prize for poetry. His prose and poetry can be found in The Penn Review, Moon City Press, The Matador Review, and others. He has had work nominated for both a Best of the Net Award and a Pushcart Prize. Currently, he lives and writes in Asheville, North Carolina. Contact him on Twitter @claytonkrollman.
