March 22-28, 2004: Pamela Liou and Dennis Mahagin

Pamela Liou and Dennis Mahagin

BECOME A POET OF THE WEEK
click here for submission guidelines

Bio (auto)

Pamela Liou attends St Catherine’s School in Richmond, Virginia Her poem “Sonnet of Ether” Has been featured in the 2003 edition of Celebrations: Young Poets.

The following work is Copyright © 2004, and owned by Pamela Liou and may not be distributed or reprinted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.

Ole Billy We’d cancer up behind the theatre Breathe each other in with stereoscopic Depth, and Drowned the tension with Jack Daniels I toasted youthful indiscretion   When right about throwing me back Behind his lower lip and coughed On the chain smoke emanating from mine— I Don’t think he liked me Trying to please, pleasing To prove these inadvertent faculties Pining; drift a thousand leagues beneath his eyes He bit his lower lip; Was I not one of those cute subculture Bevies with everything and all Who rattled off names, facts with expert Precision? He still didn’t like me I gave myself to him one summer morning, Hiding in headlights The breathe falters Sinks hysterical; These are the nights when company walks you away from home— Staged teen flicks, Air-waves Crash against our Faces Took one another in like salt water, choking Sticking to the floor Did he feel fit inside, oh Not like keen words I don’t think I liked him— Reduced to dead weight on my shoulders. Late to Your Wake: A villanelle I came to kneel right besides you to pray The path here is quite long from where I come from Please accept these sorries for my delay End of binding of hymn books have frayed Drawn-out aves struck me quite dumb I came to kneel right besides you to pray Unheeded warnings of the Ides of May For these, I have paid such a handsome sum— Please accept these sorries for my delay Among you to rest, such flowers they lay Over power my one chrysanthemum; I came to kneel right besides you to pray The congregation where I’m but one, they Speak of the heavens from which you’ve come Please accept these sorries for my delay I meant no harm not coming right away, So that I could not see what you’ve become I came to kneel right besides you to pray Please accept these sorries for my delay pretty vicious thing jaywalking bought her the seconds to slip away from sight, all Spanish and gorgeous just spreading her strides ( a crossing in staccato) The shirt tail caught the wind and floats like falling, in as sweet a crescendo– the song you never wrote– somewhat the same lyrically In precision she takes the ride thumbing a command to traffic-laden men with a bare and milky knee; and I fade like that tune, out of memories of the vacant eyes of lashes befallen And daddy hits the notes, with a belt.

Dennis Mahagin
Mahagin@aol.com

Lot’s Wife in the Laundromat Running another load, fisting the fat quarter roll in a painted nail Thinker’s Pose, she sniffs and squints, giving the Evil Eye to Petition Gatherer Boy who’s set up shop with his clipboard sandwiched between the gumball machines and soap dispenser There is a kind of satisfaction in picturing him all got up in her still-dripping panties and pasties bent over a soggy linen pile as she puts it to him with all eight inches of her veiny purple strap-on, but the image is soon enough chased from her mind by the warning buzzer of another dryer needing feeding She remembers morbidly bottom-trolling the guest bathroom hamper for her 1st-husband’s t shirts saturated with enough dried semen to give them a kind of Dead Sea Scroll consistency– making her think of fish wrap and pus-spackled tourniquets overflowing infirmary trash baskets She remembers waitressing at a Spokane Denny’s years and years ago, when the Mia Farrow-looking mother of five cloaked the dinner roll basket and deep fried zucchini platter with the steaming discarded diapers of her squalling twin infants right there, in real time at Table Eleven and then left her a fifty cent tip But now coming up on Spin Cycle and she’s staring hard at the fat college girl folding fitted sheets in a shower of spit and flying crumbs simultaneously humming  a Shania Twain tune as she goes to work on her fourth can of Pringles– dabbing her mouth daintily with Febreze fabric softener sheets She wants to scream at the girl–at everyone– to make it unequivocally understood how laundry is an exercise in futility, and absurdity–how the whole fucking world is simply fooling itself to think otherwise, but just then her overloaded machine starts to buck like a forklift sinking in fits and starts through the slats of a rotting pier, and the quarters she’d been squeezing so tight in her little hand suddenly go flying all over the tiled floor. Word for Rage in Aramaic At the whistle-stop stump pulpit, Christ on a Crutch breaking with psoriasis and Dengue Fever shiver-shudders and plays a Jethro Tull flute riff on the udders of an opalescent bifurcated ram’s head barnacle, before thrusting it in your face like a smoldering Hindu hooka pipe You’ll find no languid sighs of lapping surf swell in this here gourd, but go on ahead and shove it up tight on your candy apple temple and you might just make out six million baby back ribs going up like cricket scritch in a reeling red carpet of napalm, while cervical wind socks and pelvic pinatas get shaken and stirred by upended Klansman party favor cones catching viscera scraps at the peach tree lynching repeating itself on Pay Per View repeating itself “I’ll be bawk,” announces the bantamweight Austrian maintenance man, as he bangs the cockeyed  crow-colored shower head with his pipe wrench and a hiss erupts all staccato and intermittent like a misplaced cymbal on the upbeat of a catchy polka and he climbs on down his pigeon-shit-spattered step ladder humming it This is the sound of a redundant defibrillator dry-humping the whine on an ICU flat-line– one last great guttering resuscitation gasp siphoning snot-colored bile off the atrial tit of the human heart and I suppose things just can’t help getting a little shaky then, until Jesus goes “Shhhhh “ and shoves a slender fuck finger in the offending dike of his conch shell– holding it right there like a square knot on a pretty pink pig tail tassle Within the ensuing hermetic seal suck, your eyelids will snap shut as the carotid sprays a sandstorm of shrapnel into your withering brainstem, and you go out peacefully to the faraway tambourine tinkle of sleigh bells.