Notes on Minor Chords

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                                                                                                        First published by The Tokyo Poetry Journal

You slip on black ice around the corner from a club 

where your glass flooded with refills & you came up empty. 

You skate like a flopping fish, clutch the nearest ledge 

to break the fall & barely dodge an ashen man in a tattered

coat playing Gloomy Sunday on a crooked violin. He glances

at his newfound audience as he would a pigeon or a tourist or 

yet another drunk chump. You sigh and stay seated because 

you’ve nowhere better to be & you don’t know if you can

walk or hobble to a doctor to fix the knife’s edge that stabs

your tailbone or your gut — it hardly matters which when 

no one cares. His notes coil around your core like lake fog 

that shrouds and thaws. You notice rests carry measures, 

yet suffer silences of notes unsung that bounce off beats

you believe belong in a song that should be. As the tune 

draws to a close, you sense climax rises from crescendos 

rooted in flattened notes. You stand at a muted moment 

before sunrise blazes marigold across the sky 

& savor the undertones of the song in C minor.