Peter Magliocco

Peter Magliocco writes from Las Vegas, Nevada, where he’s been active in the small press as editor, writer, and artist for several years. A multiple nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, his most recent poetry books are Go to the Pain Lovers (Duck Lake Books) and The Underground Movie Poems (Horror Sleaze Trash).

In the Void Once Ars Poetica

The night when it seeks your own shadow

Is where you’ll become crosshatched:

Complaining to a myriad of insects tormenting you

To herald the dawn of reason

(Bug spray is out of the question for this),

& rise again to seek whatever’s out there.

Namely the Void, to writers that is

Like Fleur Jaeggy & others.

Hear it?

Even nothing is music to the grim senses

Ironed out by video games, social media,

& serrated tongues of newsy disciples.

No one is home in the Void but everyone

Living there gets a great idea of very little.

So sacred, those black holes in space

Reminding you of the big suction’s allure

Into the unknown awaiting you.

Inside the energy of a great vacuum

There’s nothing more to tell those outside

Except the poem goes on, flickering words

Of star-shine (& hope)

With a heartache’s steadfastness.

From a space where your mind labors

To erase all empty writing, like a bad typo.

The Extra

Lovers sing from mountain balconies, I’m told

Lacking only Romeo’s hip-hop foreskin

To cushion their fall

As recorded on cell phone video.

Bet you’ve never been a chained victim

(Naked & bleeding?), debating why you took a job

In some desolate basement for a B-movie

You’re an extra in,

Shot on location in another lusterless city,

Dirt cheap, during the great quarantine.

The chic woman who wrote the screenplay

Insists on calling herself a poet/auteur

“Of images & sounds”

& upbraids the director for sexist attitudes.

Human love halted in mid-production.

Rumors of satanic witchcraft abounded

In this faux-suburban monstrosity of stucco

Bearing mold’s malice,

Amid the tippling presence of drunk ghosts

Only she can see behind the camcorder’s lens.

Not really a found footage horror movie,

Just itemized emotions laid bare in drag dress

Rehearsals, uncut, without real

Traces of meaning, the auteur says.

When God is just another extra missing

In the unseen background

You’ll hurl curses at, watching the truth die.

Resurrected Notes from Her Last Concerto

Tonight the dream of god in the eye of man enraptures all,

Transforming us from an ulterior species bemoaning disquiet,

Into the exceptional strata of those seeing the way

Through a cacophony of demons, unshackling restrictions

While cultivating everyday graces. (Such as?)

The wattle ambience of our vision re-focusing throughout time

As it cascades in elemental freefall beyond death & no redemption:

How I woke up that morning in unmediated straits,

Staring back at Helene’s piano keys

Mocking me with an impenetrable display of transcendent shimmering

Waiting to imbibe the nectar’s cloud falling while, in bawdy rapture,

I’ll take the erotic fossil from the eye of strangers, Helene -- & bolster the tempo

Of your maestro’s malaise? Into that seeming richness of houses recast

Across your tempering brow I’ve seen my rebuilt emotional edifices

Resonating in nerves of forgotten princesses, until my ancient branch stings

With scorpion breadth, scintillating their nocturnal obeisance to wills

Advertised as: “Of indescribable might”

Turning me from the banal Hyperion of cockroach dreams

Into a forest of the mind reborn, where new thoughts emerge

From the hemispheric reliquary (of regal old renegades) engaged

In the feast of your alabaster skin we flourish again

Seeking (& seeking still)

Hands of the born-free pianist as she rocks

{“A God-spell from the edict of trammeled migrant suns: where I’ll wait

Fomenting megabytes on the lips of savants bittersweet as shadowy lime pouring

Its phosphorescent paint onto your canvas of transplanted hearts.

In the pinball monastery she bossed me, the new goddess of cyber-gleam

& digital amour …! Plucking her violin strings on the teeth of camels

Nesting with alien insects larger than recalled cars with Bluetooth gums

Broadcasting the fall of gods & mortals? To bask in your radiance as I

Unleash the gross desires of Onan into the weed of Tolstoy’s whisker,

Sweeping dung from my front porch at transparent dawn as blackbirds

Skitter across the street’s asphalt horizon>: “I see your aura’s clinging”}

On the notes of our forbidden concerto, where only lust

Circumvents a need to relish ////////// the denuding flesh

Of sapient shadows: so now out the door I follow you,

Careful to avoid the falling rain’s thundering drumroll of deathless pain,

One with the creatures worshipping your dashed hands

We’ll reverberate the ivory chord of joys sonorous