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UNDERGROUND VOICES: POETRY
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DENNIS MAHAGIN
WORSE The dentist, who looked a lot like Don Imus in tightie-white linen smock, with a pucker of sour milk smirk--as though to button a shocking secret hidden between the sleeve of his upper lip and starkly gleaming canine at the pink gum line, this dentist he leaned over me, inquiring about variously acceptable anesthetic aesthetics; I looked him straight in the Adam’s Apple, said I preferred to be splashed by the nitrous gas, or at least some uncut morphine drilled into the funny bone hollow beneath my left ear lobe. That, at any rate was the Plan. “Sorry, I’m a Lidocaine Man," this Imus said, in a pristinely husky Anglo Saxon voice dripping condescension and a Numb Bottom Lip-Look gave me to believe there was no choice but to open up wider, when he said so, and go wider and wider still, if that’s what it took. * * I tell you, this Extraction from Hell, like Hamburger Hill battle of bulging abscessed chipmunk cheek chock-full of steaming hot pus, took a little over 4 hours, my stubborn throbbing molar actually broke off the stainless steel head of Doc Donny’s best Dime Store forceps, I could hear the chunks hit the instrument tray, and knew that no rotten tooth would ever ring out in quite that way… “Time for Plan B,” I heard Imus say; and he got down then, friends, with scalpel and trowel-like entrenching tool, with a wrestler’s leverage and infantry man’s scowl, he took out that unholy tooth in sections, like some kind of archeologist's dig at Chateau Thierry or Phnom Pen, you dig? And that was the worst, right? That must have been the absolute undeniable worst, and for damned sure. Dear archivist, inquiring Mind, builder of phallic black marble monuments to the wretched Everyman Grunt, the bled-dry, piled sky-high on slow-floating tugboat pyres down frothy Potomac, 'twas pretty fucking bad, but hardly the worst, in fact the longer I hang around this planet Earth, dates with Docs such as Donny fill up my memory mind like cherry slush cone juice and Junior Mint mush—rushing into a brand new cavity... a theater interlude, if you will, or benign beach stroll leaving footprints in hills of sand like miniature fox holes slowly filling with salt water and jelly fish plasma-- ten barefoot little squiggly piggy toes digging the damp, making those sucking chest wound sounds that give breath the brief Right of Way, in the wake of more bloody artillery craters coming all too soon--for existence to feel suspiciously like a war. * * "Now, which pharmaceutical do you prefer for the pain?" Imus inquired, in a whipped, gravelly refrain, sea water rushing right back out again, singing: squish… squish…squish…squish… splish - wish splish - squish - wish splish - squish- wish - sssshhhhhhh... --all of it as bloody undercurrent for explicit instructions Miss Assistant Nurse Hygienist will always list, right after the fourteenth tooth gets pulled she'll tell you for the fourteenth time not to go around sucking anything for a fortnight at least, lest the tender jaw bone blood clot break-- under some dusky Hawthorne tree in pharmacy parking lot, whose canopy of needle-sharp leaves makes a perfect blind spot for a filthy dreadlocked tweaker with a foot of lead pipe, and dough boy bandage drooped low over one eye—3 days into hard drug withdrawal, waiting patiently to take you off your paltry refill issue of Percocet, which will seem like the absolute worst thing, but of course it is not—not ever, not hardly, not yet. 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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© 2007 Underground Voices |
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