Hill of Beans

Let's say you've got a hill of beans
to pick through, seeking just those
few you need for stew, a special
dish without which you will die.

Let's say just the blue ones are what
your essential organs need to go on
pumping blood and air, and blue beans
are intransigently rare. Let's say you

attempt to fool your body with the green
or gold or red legumes that offer
themselves up profusely in the pile,
but let's say every time you soak

and steam and eat them up you
double over, spit up bile. There's
nothing else to do but keep pursuing
blue: without them you are through.

That's about the size of how I feel
when I reflect on missing and not
being able - ever - to discover you.

Guy Kettelhack is the author or coauthor of more than thirty nonfiction books. His poetry has been featured in Outstretch, Van Gogh’s Ear, Melic Review, New Pleiades, Malleable Jangle, WORM 33, Triplopia (in whose July 2004 “laughter contest” his poem “Log On” won first prize), David Taub e-motion (“Harp Strings” was selected to be read as their monthly selection for August 2004), Poetry Life & Times (where he has been a featured poet twice - June and August 2004), Poetry in Emotion (Autumn 2004), Das Alchymist Poetry Review (March 2005), guest poet on the PK list anthology (December 2004). Two of his poems placed in the InterBoard Poetry Competition in 2004. His poem “Alter Ego” was selected as a quarterfinalist in the Lyric Recovery competition in March 2004. He won the Margaret Reid Poetry Prize for Traditional Verse in November 2004. Approximately twenty of his poems will appear in the New Pleiades Anthology of 2005. He lives in NYC.