UNDERGROUND VOICES: POETRY
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JOSH JENNINGS
The Wolves It’s a ghastly time to be naked: waking up in a hotel room closet as last night’s bile fries on the cobble stones 20 floors down. How did the underpants wind up there? Neither the rats, the pigeons or the buskers could care less. “I don’t think an ambulance will help,” somebody says eventually. A black sun dawns in the heart as it pumps out a wooden and wonky beat. And that bar, the one-time church, is now a dead-end: It’s where the neon-coloured woman with silicone breasts is motorboating an old man with cobwebs in his ears - in the darkest corner of the room. The street is no kinder. It’s benches feel like cactuses and it’s signs are crooked. It ages with tuberculosis while cars with spooky headlights hiss past and spread Cold War-gloom through their horns. The wolves are roaming the mind’s corridors tonight, smacking their lips and nudging the doors with their noses; the bomb finally detonates in the mind and the eyes fill with the flames of an apocalypse. Somebody unbuttons his shirt and pours water on him, and he huddles tight as his breathing shallows, his fever soars, his pulse turns hell-wards and the tremors barrel through his yellowing limbs. “The ambulance won’t make it tonight,” somebody whispers eventually from a long way away. But the wolves are already here, again. Josh Jennings is a journalist in Melbourne, Australia and has published poems and short stories in a number of publications including Dogmatika, Word Riot, Sex and Guts Magazine, Neon, Idiom 23 (Australia), The New England Review (Australia) and Beyond The Rainbow (Australia). |
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