
Peter Magliocco writes from Las Vegas, Nevada, where he’s been active in the small press for several years as editor, writer, and artist. He has recent poetry in The Literary Yard, Pulp Poets Press, The Pangolin Review, Harbinger Asylum, and has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net in poetry. His latest poetry book is Go to the Pain Lovers from Duck Lake Books.
Poem Inside a Poem
The keen moment of undeniability in the raven sun of being cascaded across the throw rug embroidered by my missing hand I will write these lines with. The divine is not in me tonight as I scour the city for vulgar escapisms, bloated by enough illusions to cripple myths of my middle-age. Carousing, I’ll yet banish memories of all the bad jobs I’ve had: how I screwed-up carelessly serving ice cream at Thrifty’s (my hands, so bacteria-laden). The aging phantasm still arises, now plaguing me with neuro-pricks & senility’s creeping onslaught, cutting me no slack in neon sunsets. I turn inside/out, a reversible jacket of sorts, seeing my life flip-flop into an upside-down book of nothing but run-on sentences stumbling down the pages, just another censorious scribbler & pot-boiler In the “typo” flesh
Yesterday with the Cam Goddess at Starbucks
The extant muse climbs the tightrope of yearning, falling fast into an abyss of desire (where I wait Limbic, to catch her) before the gameboy Mars rover does, signifying dream-shadows we awake to prosaic wan mornings together as street cleaners purge streets ravaged by the nightly detritus spawned by nature’s timeless discontent; nothing interrupts the wankers parading into Starbucks for java, while on your smartphone you plan the day’s detailed event-agenda dressed in your retro-90s winter wear (& listening to radio mind-warp) you dread going into work, preferring the occupation of idleness where there’s little pay to speak of & retirement unmarred by nightmares of natural or unnatural forces interfering with a plenitude of infinitesimal micro-pleasures of flesh peeling away soft layers in the cheap porn theater of your being where the digital politicos chuckle waving rubbers like placards trying to sexually redress your body politic you decry the serial killer shooters performing public euthanasia nightly in nooks of midland Americana. I explain how another woman left me (countless years, & years, ago:) but of course your ear of sympathetic listening goes with the swiftness of migrant refugees or the crows outside, winging dully away. “There must be some way out of here,” croons the legendary rock star over the store’s invasive speakers with their static-ridden white noise of sound & same-old discontent taking you & myself, the homeless derelict, reaching up for your cyber vision with stigmatic hands