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The Dormouse and The Wig

by Daniel Lev Shkolnik

“These are strange and uncertain times,”
said the dormouse
        to the drag queen’s fallen wig.
The stock market was acting up again
        and overflowing its banks
The lords rode the tides.
The peasants drowned in their cars.
The evangelicals hoped that
        with the Jews now in Jerusalem
The Beast would soon arrive and deal judgment
        from its ass-crack
                ending all their unfinished arguments
                with the atheists.
“Strange how love can still be found
        in days like these,” replied the wig.
                “Even more so now
                than at any other time.”

Daniel Lev Shkolnik

Daniel Lev Shkolnik owns a Yale sweater he will never wear. He takes his Faulkner with absinthe and his absinthe with an orange rind. In Istanbul, he learned to read the future in his coffee grinds. Despite the omens he repeatedly finds at the bottom of his morning joe, Daniel continues to write. As a journalist, he's reported on Spain, Morocco, Turkey, and the U.S. His fiction and poetry has appeared at the Beacon Art Gallery in Boston, as part of the Yale Art Museum poetry anthology Lux, et Veritas, as well as in The Fictional Cafe, SIIR, Cease, Cows, Lotus Eaters, Apparent Magnitude, and elsewhere. Once upon a time, he was awarded a medal for writing from his high school. His mother is still proud.