In a galaxy relegated to a safe distance
by the gyrations of the cosmotectonic plates
a purple-urpled phthonk
was knee-double-deep in tracing
its ancestry back to a Higgsless boson.
An observer who managed to remain casual
might have noted its resemblance
to a randomly transmogrified crwth.
But since putative observers, casual or not,
are ill-placed to note much of anything,
the phthonk remains happily beyond compare
and our narrator is foiled again.
Moral: if your hero is a phthonk
you risk your story’s ending with a phthunk.
Esther Greenleaf Murer, a relic of the 20th Century, lives in Philadelphia. She has been featured poet in The Centrifugal Eye and KIN. She has published one collection, Unglobed Fruit. Links to some of her poems published in online zines may be found her blog at http://esthergreenleafmurer.