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
Comments