Swiss Kriss Diet

By David Mills

MsSaraKelly, Trumpet Player by El Gal Mao (2013), cropped from original. CC BY 2.0.

This is one of a series of poems exploring the life and work of jazz pioneer Louis Armstrong.

Louis Armstrong consumed and was fixated by the laxative Swiss Kriss for the last two decades of his life

I’m a high-strutting yo-yo diet,

the gut and down every year or so.

But people fixate on my weight,

like I got cancer. No, I got Swiss

Kriss. See if you do correct vegetables,

you could pinch up and lose a gut c-

note with the Harper’s Bazaar diet

sheet (only cost a quarter). And I

lost ten grand in pounds. That’s

a helluva an investment.

shortlink: dogb.us/diet

David Mills is a Piltdown Review Featured Poet for June 2019. He is the author of two books of poetry—The Dream Detective and The Sudden Country, a book-prize finalist. His most recent manuscript is also a finalist for the Crab Orchard Review Prize. He has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Breadloaf, and the Queens Council on the Arts. He has an MFA from Warren Wilson College. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Crab Orchard Review, Fence, Colorado Review, and Vermont Literary Review. He has also recorded his poetry on RCA Records and for ESPN, and had poems displayed at the Venice Biennale.

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