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UNDERGROUND VOICES: POETRY
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DENNIS MAHAGIN
Puxatawnie In His Dun Period Most Groundhog Days we hunched under hummocks, flicking our Bics, and thumping Platypus tails like Popsicle sticks. We used back-lit wavy-gravy claws and digits, flashing familiar gang signs, until the Kabuki got too spooky on mud cake walls, turned us into penitentiary rubes with pituitaries on the fritz-- too tall, too tall Rorschach stains on zippered britches buckling… Someone pulled a thread from a tuber root overhead, it clicked like a light bulb chain, a semaphore for nap time. Lately, I’d begun to wonder, as these Winters run, one into another, and another-- if existence was nothing more than Tivo-filtered Super Bowl Halftime Shows in which Jagger and Springsteen never age, while a pre-dawn stench of hoar frost on sagebrush reminds me how prophecy is history written in reverse, a Ponzi by Rumi, generational curse, false Spring after false Spring repeating. But I suppose it’s okay, since I dress in layers, tends to ward off incessant Deja Vu digressing into retrograde amnesia, this longing limned by dread. Waking from my single bed of leaf mulch, once again I see my cousin co- mingling with a mole in a nearby cloud of dust. They chuff, they back bite, somersault and squeal, but I ask you: If our ending’s really been told already, what's the sense in ever climbing out of this hole again? Dennis Mahagin is a poet and fiction writer from the Pacific Northwest. His work appears widely, in such publications as Juked, Exquisite Corpse, Thieves Jargon, Pequin, Storyglossia, Slow Trains, Clean Sheets, Absinthe Literary Review, Frigg Magazine, 42opus, Keyhole, and 3 A.M. Magazine. He is currently seeking a publisher for his orphaned poetry collection, entitled Grand Mal. Dennis' website is located at: http://fourhourhardon.blogspot.com. His email address is: mahagin@aol.com |
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© 2009 Underground Voices |
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