Karen Mandell

K a r e n  M a n d e l l

Turning the page

They’re putting strange things

on the paper’s second page.

Yesterday, someone found an emerald

in a North Carolina pasture.

In Romania, a dinosaur was shoveled

from his seventy million year hidey-hole.

Today, a woman’s stuck in a chimney,

feet first, at her boyfriend’s house.

In other news, a mayor’s daughter shoplifted makeup.

Her father’s mantra: Stop petty crime.

Sipping hot cocoa, smoothing almond butter

on a rye cracker, I want to make sense

of it all. Animal and mineral, rage and want,

stacked neatly in columns

up and down the page.