Peter Magliocco writes from Las Vegas, Nevada, where he occasionally edits the lit-‘zine ART:MAG. He has recent work in online & print publications like ARIEL CHART, THE PANGOLIN REVIEW, WORD dish, SCARLET LEAF MAGAZINE, ODDBALL MAGAZINE, HARBINGER ASYLUM, MIDNIGHT LANE BOUTIQUE, and elsewhere. His new poetry book is Go to the Pain Lovers from Duck Lake Books, 2020. His latest speculative sci-fi/ horror novel is Dire Chimera, a Nook ebook published by Limited Editions Press in 2019.

Austere Cantata

What chance to see you in profane hours
stealing the epiphany of your music
as salient ivories resound to your touch,
 
the skin’s mired edifice
not going beyond my erudite desire
to enhance the essence of what remains
           
            (from the first note
                        to the last:)
 
your austere cantata overwhelms time
to bring your audience of quislings
a perfect sight in velvet hue,
 
synaesthesia of unthrottled eye & ear
to merge within the fossil earth’s rebirth,
 
            since the last touch
            your rose-piano plucks
is a Greek-fed tongue few can touch.
 
But bring me your electronic epistles
to scare martyrs in anti-wonderlands,
I’ll remake stone in your image
 
to read over the trebled mass
Beethoven’s deaf ears will hear again.

inside the outside

god is just the devil in drag
waiting to be translated into rhyme
with double meanings eluding us
it’s enough to see fossils
in the mouth of shadows
 
blocking the way to purgatory
where exotic skeletons leap
as plaintive coyotes howl
something in you reaches
a respiration of pure being
 
akin to a downhill rush
of your car going off a cliff
to resound thru echoing night
we mortal beings hurtling down
roads leading to greener pastures
 
or gardens where weed grows
in the shadow of long-stemmed roses
we plant the remnants, the husks,
the hibiscus of blossoming truth
reduced to a dog-crawl we excuse
 
our children from seeing waves
of the sweet blinding rainbow
color bites from the last living god
pulling at your sultry skin
to see the membrane’s shining
 
Monet-moment skewed in eternity
the dark things in life are overlooked
sometimes camouflaged by failings
no one but the dying god perceives  
the truly human

The Lunar Year

The seasons we knew leapfrog from us,
the days unwind in memory’s failure to sharpen
            the pointed being beneath your reliquary
                        of serrated scar tissue
breast cancer left with nature’s
                        hungering hands.
Young marrieds, we stumbled against unkind fate
                        & flesh,
feared a spirit trap brewing new cells
            far from the shadow we could not
                        free ourselves from.
We were so one with the lunar dark side
sweet passion bonded to an omnipresent bone,
            hardening our hearts
                        into a deep space,
where love is a caged foetus
mutating into the orbit of the past’s consecration.