Peter Magliocco writes from Las Vegas, Nevada, where he’s been active for several years in the small presses as writer, artist, poet, and editor of his lit-‘zine ART:MAG. His recent sci-fi horror novel, Eye of Aliena, is an Amazon ebook. Nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, his latest poetry books are Go to the Pain Lovers (Duck Lake Books), The Underground Movie Poems (Horror Sleaze Trash), and Night Pictures from the Climate Change (Cyberwit.net).

X Marks the Spot

The days breed a forlorn pallor
In the forest of our beings,	where nothing reaches us
	But the low fires of passion
Still stirring the red coals branding us.
Come to me tonight, lady of Las Vegas
There’s the ellipsis of the golden verb
	Entrapping us inside your psychic carotid,
Where the carnage of poetry bleeds out
Daily from mother earth’s domestic felons

Freed from the police line-up, they flee
Life’s ongoing fashion show remnants
While running nude through supermarkets
Debating Original Sin, quoting statistics
	& dressed like alien harlots

I run with them too, but I’m too old
For racy conversations in the trailer park
Where penis envy is as extinct as penmanship.
Freud does not exist here, only the reality shows
Where the deer & the antelope procreate

In Gen Z’s nerdy fairy tales:
Yet still I’ll ask you, what it’s like
Piercing your face with stitching needles
Seeing false northern lights	in specks of broken glass
Before deadbeat poets reveal themselves?	

Self-Portrait as Van Gogh

(Drawing the Arboreal Shade)

Where the shape of time disintegrates
Where your breath enraptures nothingness
Where I want to go tonight

Armed with camcorder & sketchbook
	My blood-tears
On the breadth of temporal pine trees

Grouped as hour-hands, blue-canopy sky
	Noir crows navigate now
In spellbound eyes of unseeing gods

& children drawn to wells of dirty rain
Seeping gum-like from the natural
Wall of impenetrable trees

I see the coming of light painted
On a sunless wing unfolding itself
Over the first promised land

God

The word is all you know, the letters circumambulating
Through the trees they came from chasing you
	Beyond the intellectual crevices

	Into the full feelings of existence.
The words were what you first heard
	In the silent wilderness
		Of infancy,

The initial moments of seeing the symbols
Etched on the earth’s surface you’d impress
	With scribbled chalk lines

	These sentiments to graffiti’s realm
In the full flight into knowledge from the word
Came the artist’s hand you wielded brush with,
Came the image of the word transforming
Yourself into a communicator with what
	The dumb silence could not hold.

Now you draw the letters into a cursive design,
One after the other, cutting into the tree’s trunk

	The initials of the great artist
		Planting it
	& the letters of spirit in your mind ….