Zev Shanken
Zev Shanken’s two full length books Memory Tricks and If I Try to be Like Him, Who Will be Like me? are available on Amazon. His poems have appeared in The New Verse News, Brevitas Festivals issues 10 – 23, Brownstone Anthology (2012), Weathered Pages: The Poetry Pole, Yes, Poetry, Jewish Currents, The Red Wheelbarrow issues 10, 11, 12, and Pooled Ink. His most recent works are JEWels (JPS/U of Nebraska) to which he contributed a number of poems as jokes and jokes as poems; Teachings of the Razbash (Babushkin’s Playhouse) and Thirty-three Poems about my Father. printed in scroll format to mimic the memory process (Babushkin’s Playhouse).
I am a famous artist who discovered in my early thirties that
drinking a full glass of a secret mixture derived from boiling
a certain OTC pill with a [name withheld] OTC ointment
for 1 hour on a low flame gave me the dexterity, vision, and stamina
to paint murals in hundreds of villages across North America.
Philosophers had become so dense that aphorisms took over
like hungry busboys clearing a banquet.
God is dead; hell is other people; I think therefore…
One busboy copped more leftovers than he could devour,
so he packed them up for his family.
