When your fever breaks
soaked in cold sweat
the bed's a shallow lake
nobody's
died in yet.
Stitches were made
to resolve into skin
remembering the blade
as a harmless
shark fin
trailing it's own wake
zipped clean through
a pristine ether lake
or scar,
as good as you.
Here it comes again, riding a sciatic nerve, white water
knee high to a boxcar. Slush and screech, of vertebrae.
Though he'd never been to Hebron, you just knew he new
the difference between a phillips head and cross top. Socket.
Mid February in Bristol Bay, Navarro caught on with a crab
boat; hung up froze old Davey's Locker. Won't speak, to this day.
Always the piquant Amtrak station in Salinas sported real wood
grain trimmings, a wee Ben clock; Walter Brennan ticket counter.
And how many lava lamps cum bong pipes you suppose bubbled
ingloriously as Joplin sang the bad sad one, 'bout Mercedes Benz?
"If I only had something to clamp down on, when the arrythmia
comes," said Father Michalis to the pocket mirror. Lonely one.
Then somebody asked the brain surgeon if it was finished
or just abandoned? Gauze masks, nodding, all around.
Custer stands
by a pay phone on the corner
of tenth and Belmont in southeast Portland, waiting
for a call back from his dealer, surrounded by
snow banks turning to slush in three
yellow levels, or days like detox
and withdrawal. Generally Custer johnny walks
semi circles, eyes peeled for cops, drawing
wet infinity signs on the pane
of the phone booth, scarred forever
by rain drops of March, breath clouds, a snort of horse
says "Armstrong by George, they gone to run you
down..."
Custer stuffs four more
quarters in the pay phone slot, pages his dealer
again, past goose flesh and yawned snot, skinny arms up-raised
in awesome anxiety, an iffy archer with the rickets; Armstrong hears
brake squeals near Colonel Summers park, the body and fender shop
on twelfth street's yellow windows, tinted blind ricochets
the fevered mind; Custer, barely even strung out
on a late winter's day, more like risking
a pay check against one hand
of blackjack, the roar
from an arroyo empty only
moments before: ten thousand hoof beats
and war whoops cutting off
limbs, angles, hatchets right straight up
between the eyes ... Now Custer's seen
the same police cruiser drive by, five times in a
half hour, he's only so-so sick so
why be pushing it? Oh, he could track down the man
holding, fifty clicks across town under a blanket
of filthy snow, so he dials the numbers
from a phone booth he knows
by heart, stuttering bleat
of albino buffalo turned
to powder, meet, and
hide; Custer rides the number
fifteen bus, with a toasty feeling now floating in
his nuts, having got off in the john of a Morrison street bowling alley
across from Corno's Grocery, the block-long billboard of Pilgrim's
pride, colorful horn of plenty pumpkin, wampum, spuds seeds
headdress and artichokes pointing
compass
needles on Burnside bridge; Custer scratches his
nose, eyelids, tugs at the blond ponytail he'll wash
later, in a claw foot hotel room tub he shares
with the love
of his life: named Libby, after
a town in Montana they went once, hurling brave little
brittle bodies among tractor marks of winter wheat,
stubble fields, as if to burrow deep into inverted
atmospheres; oh, the arrow heads whizzed
and careened neck high
while they stayed
clean for a year.
Dennis Mahagin is a poet from eastern Washington state. His writing appears in Exquisite Corpse, 3 A.M., 42opus, Stirring, Absinthe Literary Review, Prime Number, Juked, Evergreen Review, Night Train, Pank, Storyglossia, and The Nervous Breakdown, among other journals. He's also an editor of fiction and poetry for Frigg Magazine. A print collection of his poems, Grand Mal, is forthcoming from Rebel Satori Press.
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