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MAURICE OLIVER
"Scenes From A Roadtrip" Sonnet And the road goes around the world. Stop signs glowing in the headlights. All those phone booths. Cracks in the curbs. Faulty seatbelts. Noisy wipers. Stoplights that linger on red. Well-disguised landfills. A medieval amusement park. The wash cycle in a laundromat. Striped awnings. Ditches on both sides. An obsession with horns. Bugs battered against the windshield. To drive faster than the train. More thunder. Let's try to spot a mountain from a molehill she dares me from the passenger's seat. Sets of elegant gates indicating mansions. A clock tower then a small plaza. Of a hotel lobby. Market stalls some closed. Birds prepared to sing for bread crumbs. Backed by a lagoon. To where the snow line ends. A light rain. Gasoline over flowing its tank. Terra-cotta roofs. Stains left by seeping oil. Still that train whistle in the distance. Or maybe next time a cruise ship at least as far as Venice. Descriptions Of An Elsewhere But all I remember three stories of rooms A ceiling fan slicing overhead light With a sack of apples in her lap Or like soap floating in the bathtub Of the sane mind more so than the sensual mouth Black ants filing down the window sill Her radio on a country station a cigarette lit In her herbal tea makes tuna sandwiches No roads leading there no parked cars nearby And the flute plays my part as background music Her feather mattress rolled out on both our sides So I pull out the gun & we oil it together Sitting up stiffly the first sight of the suit Another man's suit with a billfold in the pocket But not one photo of the other man's wife & busted One picture of him around the nose and mouth Reminds me a little of Sam Cooke shot in a motel In a case of sexual madness her rainy underarms Skin as sensitive as a snail which melts away odd And the pie wasn't bad never did mind leftovers Maurice Oliver spent almost a decade working as a freelance photographer in Europe. Then, in 1995, he made a lifelong dream reality by traveling around the world for eight months, recording his experiences in a journal instead of photographs. And so began his desire to be a poet. His poetry has appeared in The Potomac Journal, Circle Magazine, Bullfight Review, Tryst3 Journal, The MAG, Eye-Shot, The Surface, One Forty Two Magazine, Word Riot, Retort Magazine(Australia), Taj Mahal Review(India), Stride Magazine(UK),& online at ink-mag.com,friggmagazine.com, dash30dash.com & tmpoetry.com. He lives in Portland, Oregon where he is a tutor. |
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© 2004 Underground Voices |
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