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DENNIS MAHAGIN
Karma meets Jones and they are comfortable as two hangnails smoking together in a light socket His estranged second wife and their 16-year-old son had sent him the Christmas dvd-- it was called "This Boy's Life", and he'd just come to the part where De Niro shoves Di Caprio's pink snot nose into the not-quite-empty mustard jar when the blackout hit-- at the exact same instant as his nicotine fit, and he knew there was going to be trouble when, frantically scavenging for candles in the cluttered kitchen, he smacked his brow on a wide open pantry door, yet didn't begin to howl in earnest until he knew for sure he'd spaced out his cigarettes, and he started tossing the apartment in the pitch-black like a burglar filling santa sacks, but all he could find were ashtrays full of chalky butts crushed right down to the nub. *** The gusting wind ripping bandoliers of icicles off his dormer shutters reminds him for a moment of his father pulling gnarled twenty-penny nails from two-by-fours clamped in a sawdusted shop vice to sweat out his DT's in the Sunday dawn of a bitter-cold winter solstice; it makes him remember hanging out with his hoodlum kid-buddies-- and how they so loved to fuck with old lady Anselm of the rosacea and enlarged heart by scratching her picture window with willow switches and sagebrush wreaths-- laughing as she clutched at her sunken chest, and made zig zag tracks for the hallway closet. *** And if we were to break through his reverie at this instant, say, and hand him a pocket mirror, together with a fist-sized gauze sponge to staunch the sudden nosebleed dripping in ropy rivulets off his pale, stubbled chin and down his chest; if we could point to the fact that the Doral pack has simply slipped down in back of the refrigerator next to some cobwebbed lottery tickets, mouse turds, shriveled artichoke hearts and a ten year old prescription for Ritalin, would this knowledge by itself be enough to stop him from rushing into the foyer when he hears the bell-- and the Christmas lights pop back on just then with a sudden hum and it's just some fresh-scrubbed, bundled up choir kids out there--all set to sing Silent Night? Because when he leans right into the starched white collar of the oldest caroler with all that blood, snot and sweat caked on his lopsided shirtfront-- and asks the boy with a high-pitched but hard-edged, needful voice if he can bum a smoke, it ought to be just about enough to traumatize the lot of those kids for at least half their lives-- though all they will wish for in that moment is to become smoke wisps snaking cleanly out of their own skins-- away from him, into the safety of gravel patch, driveway crack, or way up even into that halo gap between sodium and streetlamp-- wick-thin, yet white-hot enough to hurt your eyes quite a bit when you try to look right at it. LOT'S WIFE IN THE LAUNDROMAT Running another load, fisting the fat quarter roll in a painted nail Thinker's Pose, she sniffs and squints, giving the Evil Eye to Petition Gatherer Boy who's set up shop with his clipboard sandwiched between the gumball machines and soap dispenser. There is a kind of patent satisfaction in picturing him all got up in her still-dripping panties and pasties bent over a soggy linen pile as she puts it to him with all eight inches of her veiny purple strap-on, but the image is soon enough chased from her mind by the warning buzzer of another dryer needing feeding. She remembers morbidly bottom-trolling the guest bathroom hamper for her 1st-husband's t shirts saturated with enough dried semen to give them a kind of Dead Sea Scroll consistency-- reminding her of fish wrap, and pus-spackled tourniquets overflowing infirmary trash baskets. She remembers waitressing at a Spokane Denny's years and years ago, when the Mia Farrow-looking mother of five cloaked the dinner roll basket and deep fried zucchini platter with the steaming discarded diapers of her squalling twin infants right there, in real time at table eleven and then left her a fifty cent tip. But now coming up on Spin Cycle and she's staring hard at the fat college girl who is folding fitted sheets in a shower of spit and flying crumbs while simultaneously humming a Shania Twain tune as she goes to work on her fourth can of Pringles-- dabbing at her doll's mouth with Febreze fabric softener sheets. She wants to scream at this girl --at everyone-- how laundry is an exercise in futility, and absurdity-- how the whole fucking world is simply fooling itself to think otherwise, but just then her overloaded machine starts to buck like a forklift sinking in fits and starts through the slats of a rotting pier, and the quarters she'd been squeezing so tight in her little hand suddenly go flying all over the tiled floor. WHEN THE BUZZARDS SHOUT "NO AC!" YOU ARE ON THIN ICE Mike Tyson's peripatetic pet Bengal tiger pacing the open faced block-long excavation crypt in Parumph, Nevada where a middle aged casino mogul with a checkered past buried twenty tons of silver bullion nine months before the post-adolescent psychopathic newlywed wife clamped his ripcord neck between her tender thighs and squeezed a half-pint of heroin into his twitching esophagus with a turkey baster. All this stuff is true-- the glare of the sun, the satiated tiger's unrepentant yawn, and those endless striations of heat coming off the desert floor like stretch marks on a forty year old hooker bending over backwards to get you off. It's all true-- even that Howard Hughes poltergeist leisurely tapping the ash off a camel non-filter into the humidor ribcage of a tourist from Cleveland sporting a ten inch slit above the right hip where they sucked out his liver and Fed Exed it to Evil Knievel's ranch in Bozeman Montana-- that's right, go ahead and pop my frying eyes out with a cantaloupe scoop if I'm lying but here it is already a hundred and eight degrees at around noon in an alley behind the Boulevard Mall where something dredlocked and spectral --hardly human at all-- sucks a cluster of glass splinters from the busted crack vial embedded in a bleeding palm, trying to get that taste into the back of his throat one more time the tiger throws back its head, roaring at the irradiated sky and somewhere in southeastern Alaska a glacier slaps itself on the thigh, thunderclap-cackling as another twenty-ton skein of blue-veined ice goes sloughing off into the sea. Dennis Mahagin's debut poetry collection, entitled "Grand Mal", is forthcoming from Suspect Thoughts Press. His work has appeared in 3 A.M. Magazine, 42opus, Deep Cleveland, FRiGG, Stirring, and Absinthe Literary Review, among other publications. He lives and works in Washington State. |
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