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UNDERGROUND VOICES: POETRY
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DENNIS MAHAGIN
What the surgeon general meant to say Although I never hunted the gutter banks of sun-baked sewer culverts in old Rose City hoping to find sliver-burned Salem Light 100 butts kissed off with lipstick prints on filter tips, as if some lady of the night had lit up only to take a tentative stutter- puff right before changing her mind, there was this one time in a crowded Amtrak club car when I grandiosely bummed a Viceroy from a one-lunged Walter Brennan-looking bingo barker with tracheotomy voice wand that spat static-laced lottery lullabies through nasty-robotic Stephen Hawking kitchen sink Dispose All cough, until I looked askance and begged off, thankfully thumb-tapping the coffin nail, and tucking it away behind my ear, to enjoy later at my leisure. *** My first hit, if you must know, came on the morning Mount Saint Helens began to blow its horizon-size upturned-ashtray cloud all over eight western states—naked and cross- legged as I was on the post-sex canopy bed in girlfriend’s dormitory room; I took one quarter of her Kool in a single drag and promptly began to retch steamy clumps of rainbow sushi puke all over this sophomore doll’s beautiful peach pit nipples, while she flipped and flapped her wrists in a sort of fire dousing fit: “What are you doing?” she kept shrieking at me, “what are you DOING?” *** My elder brother was a stellar magician who could make a smoldering Camel Straight leap-frog and limbo like a combustible lug nut across the weltish breadth of his drumming knuckles, before popping the thing into his mouth, cherry-end first so that ice-blue slipstreams like lactation milk mist appeared to shoot from his wiggling ears and eyelid slits as he spoke the punch line with a tight-lipped ventriloquist twitch: “If you think this is a gas baby brother I can smother a field issue flame thrower with my tight rawhide ass and come up grinning like every giddy goddamned moment is surely gonna be our last.” For our Dad’s foreseeable fifty-ish funeral, my brother blew stiff-lipped smoke rings at the shuddering coffin crane that bowed low and slow with its load like mechanical impresario, and I remember he even whipped out a paisley stage hankie later, from which I imagined a string of polka dot Easter eggs might appear-- popping forth in an eye-blink bit of generous parlor room levity relief-- but all he did was dab at his ghostly pale brow, and fist-ball the colored cloth using the same ritual gesture I favored later to crumple the hundreds of half-smoked Doral packs, telling myself each time I’d kick at any cost if it fucking killed me. *** The thing is, if you really must know, I’m sitting here now in this very instant at a picture window video poker machine in a Las Vegas Nevada 7-11, chewing a cud of mint-flavored nicotine gum fat and caustic enough to burn myself a spanking fresh rectum, there’s a spectral rounder in red hooded sweatshirt sitting next to me and losing heavily--with a slow-burning Gauloise locked in a stroke-choked lower left lip corner, in fact it’s really starting to creep me out if you must know I would move to another machine but they’re all taken and everybody in here is smoking up a storm anyway it's just entirely too quiet is the thing besides the fact I can barely get a breath, and the only reason I hang around at all is that somebody is seriously due to take down a huge jackpot any second now, I can pretty much feel it in the air. 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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© 2006 Underground Voices |
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