PETER MAGLIOCCO edits the lit-zine ART:MAG from Las Vegas, Nevada. 
He has work online & in print at HEELTAP, FREEFALL, SCARS, HUDSON VIEW, TRYST and elsewhere. His book of poetry and art, Ex Literotica, 
was published in '06 by Publish America (www.publishamerica.com) ...
 


 

                           Illusion of Art

 
The sentences come back
as I write them
& resent being erased,
deleted, or changed. They're ineradicable now,
welded like buckshot remnants
to that invisible page of desire
where the impetus to make art awaits
 
Impatiently, as fingertips strafing braille
in your unconscious mind
    where it's always 3 a.m.
in Scott Fitzgerald's soul -- but you can't throw them
or him out into the street
where thoughts enunciate themselves
(with rhetorical flourishing!)
 
Far from the blank page
    on your computer screen
where faint radioactive emanations
    persistently grope for
all the imprisoned writers of the world
mentally chained to machines
    & inherited obsolete concepts
 
That should remain unwritten,
    unthought, undisturbed
the way mirage water puddles
    on distant roads are
    in the sunlight,
before you race towards them
    & they disappear.





                         Communion
 
 
I can't see the Italian family
that left me behind, though I search
through old books full of Italian words
I don't understand:  hear the voices,
heavily accented, speaking
the real language over subtitles
in films like La Strada and Bitter Rice too.
What lingers as forgotten
are tones & gestures beyond mimicking
making me a refugee from
the eternal city I wasn't born in.
There is always wine, pizza, & smells
in the kitchen of Italian mothers
stronger than anything I've known,
perhaps an accumulated residue of being
from a reality to be exiled from,
like some olive grove in heaven --
whatever vision inhabits the blood
ineradicable as sin itself,
or fully immaculate
as good & evil become
in the wafer dissolving
into nothing but hunger
on tongues.





                     Prehistoric Future
 

Who apportions what the night sees
as another raiment
covering black-boned tree limbs
lightning left
bereft of sartorial leaves
until what shimmers
    under bare growth
    longs for original roots
 
once protected from blaze 
    by some eternal keeper,
something lost when terra firma
    & the seas became hot
(as lava floods a prehistoric dark
despoiling wilderness beauty)
over a blight of centuries
roiling into demonic sweat
of hard rain --
 
killing
 
the dinosaur,
 
Man?