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UNDERGROUND VOICES: POETRY
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JOHN GROCHALSKI
...and if you won't save me please don't waste my time deja vu streets in the city no one misses but everyone lives in gray morning gray faces chinese charles bronson going back and forth to his car like an obsessive compulsive aneurysm head atypical cells heart attack gamble gas pains chest pains chess nights sodium spells cholesterol nightmares talking pipes falling leaves browning city blocks whisky breath and winedrunk soul 2008 you whore you harlot you work calendar with not enough days off kids crying in storefronts chicken wings lining the sidewalk as a man plays the accordion and smiles toward glass cities made out of beer bottles as women pull babies along glass cracked sidewalks as fortunes rise and fall and the next thirty years paint themselves across my mind in muted color while the sun rises and falls over all that i've ever known. aneurysm heavy head sore neck getting worse on my in-law's couch on a cool october saturday evening and i can't shake it so the panic sets in and i go outside to take in the night air bare feet start shivering on painted white wood the thud-head and panic getting worse tightening my chest gas pains too another problem from other months this year and i think i'm doing it i'm finally falling apart i'm too young to die i haven't even seen my new book or got the next one put together yet i haven't toured old british pubs with my wife or taken a train with her across india the steelers are 4-1 the giants are 4-1 and i don't even know who's going to the world series this year. when my wife comes out to check on me i calm a little bit my head lightens and i tell her i thought i was having a brain aneurysm though i don't quite know what having one entails and she laughs kindly then takes my hand she tells me my blood sugar is probably low. it's just that simple sometimes i guess. and we look at the darkening sky over monroe, new york where i saw my first shooting star about ten years ago. then she asks me if i want to go back inside get warm get another beer and have some dinner. i do. so we do. John Grochalski published writer whose poems have appeared in Avenue, The Lilliput Review, The New Yinzer, The Blue Collar Review, The Deep Cleveland Junkmail Oracle, The ARTvoice, Modern Drunkard Magazine, The American Dissident, Words-Myth, My Favorite Bullet, The Main Street Rag, Thieves Jargon, Underground Voices, Why Vandalism, Eclectica, Zygote In My Coffee, Gloom Cupboard, and forthcoming in the Kennesaw Review, Re)Verb, Octopus Beak Inc., and Cherry Bleeds. His short fiction has appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and in the forthcoming anthology Living Room Handjob. Grochalsk's column The Lost Yinzer appears quarterly in The New Yinzer (www.newyinzer.com), and his book of poems The Noose Doesn't Get Any Looser After Y ou Punch Out is forthcoming via Six Gallery Press. |
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