San Gabriel Valley Poetry Quarterly

DON KINGFISHER CAMPBELL
Three Layer Brownie

Via biting wind and salivic surf, he eats through, purchased from a petite waterfall-haired cheerful teenage student, a chocolate mesa, to create a crumbly cliff revealing baked layering of a heated past. The recently refrigerated Saran-wrapped surface of crusty dark brown plated mantle, held up by the deeper darker nearly black Oreonic cream-filled muddy subsoil, in turn supported by an array of larger melted chips like gigantic boulders buried in a blonde cake base, methodically vanishes. All washed down an over half-century old teaching throat in waves of bubbly cranberry red water encased in lightweight recyclable aluminum from the virtually empty great dispensing machine monolith in the busy teacher’s cafeteria rectangle.