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UNDERGROUND VOICES: POETRY
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JOHN GROCHALSKI worst agonies some days the worst agonies are typical things like missing the train after sitting through a meeting or watching a stranger smile at a child. it is standing in line for a jar of gravy behind someone with a cartload of shit as the cashier talks on her cellular phone as people talk about the cover stories on celebrity magazines and you realize that it takes so much effort to sound so common. it is watching a baseball game in october, drunk, with the lights off and the workday hours away it is getting political pamphlets in the mail or waiting on the sun to shine after another bout of insomnia. the worst agonies are so simple and precise a broken stoplight a lost pen losing a page in a book a job interview the way shadows fall on the next ugly block that you must tread toward your own personal hell it is hoping to win but knowing always that you will lose it is realizing that death is actual and that poetry rarely pays the bills. some days the worse agonies come from just having to say hello. the worst agonies come from smiling at a neighbor or just getting out of bed. and those are the days my friends that you’re happy you don’t own a gun you’re scared of heights and that the oven is electric and not gas end again i remember she was crying on the phone she said i could’ve waited until you were thirty or forty even but you had to go and screw all of this up my mother thinks you’re cheating on me and i don’t know what to think and really you’ve left me no choice here but to end this so that’s what i’m doing right now i’m ending things with you. then she got off the phone and i left the basement to get myself a beer from the refrigerator i went into the backyard it was november thirty degrees outside and i was only twenty-one years old free and i swear i felt better in that moment than i had in the last six months and fourteen years later i still get a tingle in my chest just thinking about it. so thank you thank you, mary it was the best thing you’d ever done for me in our twenty-one months together, baby. John Grochalski is a 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 You Punch Out is forthcoming via Six Gallery Press. |
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