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Riverside Boulevard
by Kenton K. Yee
art by Odilon Redon, 1882
A barkeep goes to her therapist, says:
I can’t sleep—hypnotize me. So you do and take her
to Central Park Zoo and fall crazy in love.
She cuts tail so you’re on your couch
rifling through web pages pricing colonoscopies.
Your life’s mediocre. You’re a loser. Your mother’s right.
Then you hear the lady in the balcony below you
bellowing into a headset at her son.
No, I can’t bail you out. No, I can’t take in your kids.
Know that I’ve worked my tail off to afford a balcony.
Yes, I’m saving up for tail-replacement surgery.
Her tale piques you. You ask her out to the zoo,
advise her to grab the tiger by the tail.
She struggles to hang on. The tiger bares its fangs at you!
Its tail pops off. The tiger leaps,
its front claws reaching for your cheeks.
They maul you inside and out like your father did.
The next day, bleeding, you can’t make heads nor tails
but your bipolar patients seem chipper enough.
You’re dying and they’re paying you by the hour to stay alive.
In the Hudson, fishes prowl for fallen Freudians to sleep with.
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Kenton K. Yee’s recent poems appear (or will soon) in Plume Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Kenyon Review, Threepenny Review, RHINO, BoomerLitMag, Indianapolis Review, Constellations: A Journal of Poetry and Fiction, Scientific American, and Rattle, among others. Kenton taught at Columbia University and lived on Riverside Boulevard. He writes from Northern California.