Peter Magliocco writes from Las Vegas, NV, where he’s been active in the small presses for years as writer, poet, and editor (of the lit-‘zine ART:MAG). His new poetry book is The Underground Movie Poems (Horror Sleaze Trash).
Outside the Scorched Gazebo
Hello Earth Mother, let the seed take root
in its desire for you: an isolated purging
of the path blocking you
from grasping the daily ellipsis
your thoughts sink into. Watery drops of catharsis.
Thoughts hovering before an unshed tear
from mountains rising up for the great deluge, after watching
the real housewives of cuckolds, Inc. take you
To a place you have longed to escape.
Opt for the metaphysical cancer anyway,
stay in that strange alcove weeds surround all strewn with cigarette butts (amid the scant poinsettia), never picked up by your chain-smoking
daughter from the scorched gazebo, right?
Wait then for the bad seed to die:
wait for the remission to reopen you again, while I sing, It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue during the quarantine, on You Tube.
Forget the uprooted ones you’ve left
their bodies wasted by asexual devouring
with your plants writhing, what the earth
still holds firm.
Before the Dogs Bring Down the Zoo
O Sister, they take from want of you
with blind men’s fury
to scrape veneer off the pixel image
of your face reading the news.
They stoke the fires of corporate deceit
in fibrillating hearts of the body politic hanging on your every word.
You denounce America’s corrupt society,
warning the disbelievers
of the coming cataclysm:
The color of human skin will darken beyond the monochromatic mind-sets of
those downplaying racial injustice
on playgrounds of slime
where the damned keep masquerading
As born-again police;
for the facts are a slippery slope, you say leering into the camera’s eye before signing off,
later chastising the hypocritical dog owner poop-littering the zoo.
Night becomes day, flesh becomes spirit
in the shape of things to come
the bright flowers of pandemic evil
encircle our necks
Like a noose-necklace of colorless bondage
Tomorrow Will Be a Forgotten Memory
For this innerness where is the body? -- Rilke
In the ganglia of the rich lurks Shiva
peddling a new liturgy for all those
who have lost faith in Amazon or Mr. Trump
Forgotten as mad marauding mayhem
perhaps, burning the Stars & Stripes
beyond the Covid-19 slaughterhouse of ravaged bodies
where the death counts mount daily lungs are cross-ventilated from oblivion as the medicos seek
for the perfect vaccine your ex-lover
imbibed after the saliva test
knowing she’s positive as hell
I offer her a marijuana edible
later to soften her omnipresent anxiety:
“It’s much worse in India, you know
the mortality rate is off the charts.”
Driving her home, passing the protesters
for Black Lives Matter, she blurts out how she hates the women-hating rappers who she believes are blocking my old Mazda.
Does it matter who’s positive or negative now? Days will pass into the quantum black hole
of evolutionary extinction where humanity is a forgotten relic, I think,
just as Dad calls on my cell to ask
the name of his now deceased only son
at the unchanging red traffic light.
impspired 