Richard Krause

A SPLIT MIND IS CONVENIENT TO HIDE THE AXE

Nobody will identify the glitter of the buried axe in the darkness of the split mind. Nobody ever sees it wielded in the sunlight again. Instead the split mind sheathes it completely. Never mind the calluses on the hands of those who swing it. The hostility of wood in even feminine hands. And when medication makes the split mind lose control of the facial muscles, the family is as far from blaming the sharp blade embedded in the mind as they are from accounting for the disappearance of the calluses on their own hands.


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Richard confesses: "Poe's 'I...buried the axe in her brain' has always made a deep impression on me. I was probably also trying to account for my family's hand in the institutionalization of my uncle from adolescence to his late seventies for schizophrenia."

RICHARD KRAUSE has had two collections of fiction published titled Studies in Insignificance (Livingston Press, 2003) and The Horror of the Ordinary (Unsolicited Press, 2019). A third collection, “Crawl Space" & Other Stories of Limited Maneuverability, will be published by Unsolicited press in 2021. He also has had two collections of epigrams published, Optical Biases (EyeCorner Press in Denmark, 2012) and Eye Exams (Propertius Press, 2019). His prose poems have recently appeared in Poesis, Shot Glass Journal, Menacing Hedge, Poemeleon, and in Triggerfish Critical Review. Krause lived for nine years in Japan and currently lives in Kentucky where he is retired from teaching at a community college.