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Topsy by Peter Mladinic My dark side isn’t as dark as
Thomas Edison’s.
Edison gave us light, and for that like any sane person I’m down on my knees thanking
him. But what about Topsy
the elephant? A barker or some such shoved a lit smoke, the orange tip up
Topsy’s trunk and
Topsy hurt the barker, crushed his foot or just sprained his foot. For that Topsy, outside a tent,
chained standing
but immobile, got electric
bolts shot through her. She was wired, it’s on YouTube, smoke rising, the elephant’s ponderous
fall, all because Edison tried
something out. Afterwards
he celebrated the execution, broke out the champagne. Hooray for advancement! He shook hands with circus higher ups and ones who did the dark work.
Bundy by Peter Mladinic An
infant he sucked my nipple as I lay in the hospital. Fifteen,
single. I lived two years in Mrs. Eliot’s
home, then I met and married Steve, Ted came
home, and we, Steve and I gave him a younger brother and sister. Our
eldest, handsome, affable, grades good
enough for law school, I was proud, someday maybe for Ted my
firstborn, politics. Today I sit in court with others, in
Florida. Ted, his own defense lawyer, wears a suit, a
bow tie. I slap prosecutor hard across the mouth, at least
in my mind. My blood boils how he lies: the
VW bug, the cast-crutch sympathy seduce. A hammer-rope rape
kit, jail escapes, a twelve-year-old
victim, the sorority rampage, bludgeoned by
this subhuman savage. Sex with the dead, the victims’ mothers families
in court, as I am, weeping, only my child is here, his own
attorney. Ted worked
a suicide hotline. A clerk at a law firm, nothing amiss. In jail yesterday,
in a jailhouse jumpsuit, he leaned across a table and looked in
my eyes. I didn’t do it, Mother.
Calais by Peter Mladinic Stationed
at a place listed on official forms as
US NavSta Cutler, a radar station in Maine,
I was assigned its commissary store, and
reported to Chief Hadler, Kenneth Hadler,
a Catholic. I imagine his asking me if I believe
in God. I don’t recall exactly where
or when I told him I too was Catholic. One
Sunday I rode with Chief Hadler and others
from our station, fifty miles to Calais,
Maine, a meeting of the Knights of Columbus,
a Catholic men’s group. It was upstairs.
I barely recall that meeting. I assume
we prayed, words about the K of C were said.
Downeast Calais speaks to the fled—but
where to—in me, my flash
in the pan, out of the way antithesis
to Bar Harbor, Kennebunkport. I imagine
Christ on a cross on a wall, watching
over us that Sunday afternoon my only
K of C meeting. I was eighteen. Now, seventy-five,
an agnostic who leans more toward
atheism than religious faith, I remember
Chief Hadler smoked cigarettes but not
what brand. I see him in khaki shirt and
slacks, a cap with a gold anchor insignia
above its black visor. Being in
Calais, a city of brick and wood, was like
walking in a giant’s wooden leg.
The Room by
Peter Mladinic The
other’s feelings go out the window or lie like shoes in a box
on a shelf in the closet. I
sit on the bed’s edge, I take up the whole bed.
There’s no chair for
the other or for me to
look in their eyes, see how they feel, or tell by how they sit,
with their hands moving or still. Out
the window treetops thick and green. Were
it winter, the other and I could look out at a river,
bigger than both of us. I
care about how you feel, I say to the wallpaper’s western
motif: cowpokes lasso steers
and gather round a fire.
Elvis’s Pompadour by Peter Mladinic I can’t see Tricky
Dick or JFK like that, clean-cut young man, doing his patriotic part
far from Sun Records West Memphis and
the Shreveport stage where hips and a prop-guitar rock him into
idol spotlight. Later, in a photo with Nixon at the White
House— I’ve
enlisted Elvis to help me fight drugs— it hides ears that had listened
to “Mystery Train” at Sun and heard possibilities. By
the time of the White House photo the face is beginning to
bloat. His hair not shoulder-length
but long, his eyes— he’s
a drug-addled Vegas Elvis, the King, sure, but a far cry from
the hip shaker idol of Louisiana Hayride. “That’s All
Right, Mama” frenzies teens. Behind Elvis,
a pink stage jacket. His brow’s dissenting cowlick the right
touch.
Hachiko by Peter
Mladinic The Akita
walked to the Shibuya Station with Professor Ueno, each
day, each day at the station waited for Ueno’s
return. One day Ueno didn’t return, Hachiko
waited nine years. So at least
he made himself a legend of loyalty. People near the station gave
him treats, petted him. Even a dog statue there in his memory,
his story in films the sentimental watch with
a box of Kleenex nearby. Give Hachiko a moment before turning
away. He earned it. Though he’s no longer
there at the station, to feel your fingers scratch
behind his ears. So easy
to pull a Kleenex from box, watch the credits and then get ready for
your dental appointment, or a round of golf or a dock where
on a forklift you take pallets into
and out of trucks at Star Distributing, or sit at a desk in a bank. That
memory of Hachiko buried in a stack of papers that comprise a
to-do list, one: buy Lady a collar at
Pet Sense. Maybe you have in addition to Lady, Duke (two mutt rescues,
and Midnight, a cat, a third rescue). Your
hands full, no room for more pets. While
Hachiko rescued himself, his
heroic deed, simply to live, makes possible,
not a memory, (he died
in 1935), but our knowing he lived, if only for a moment,
before turning to other things.
Nuns by Nature by Peter
Mladinic are
chaste. You have to be pretty chaste, clean,
to be a nun, really clean to be a nun that
sails from Ireland to Ellis Island and
in Fort Lee starts Holy Angels Girls Catholic
High School. Since I can’t come up with chaste’s opposite,
corrupt? I’ll say dirty. You have to be pretty dirty
to be a vamp, a priestess of seduction and corruption
in decadent Hollywood, a vamp, a femme fatale,
Doņa Sol in the famed silent Blood and
Sand. I’m thinking of Nita Naldi, niece of
the Holy Angels (that my sister attended) founder.
Mary Dooley, aka Nita Naldi went there
too, and dropped out. From what I know Mary
was born in an East Side slum, three siblings died when
infants, she was orphaned at fourteen, but I guess looks, talent,
luck and something, the hand of God?
driving the inner Mary, landed her in a studio,
modeling, then in a chorus line, then in
silents being filmed in Fort Lee. Fort Lee was
Hollywood before Hollywood was Hollywood.
How’d she ever find time and energy, with all the rickets
and scurvy of the East Side slum, to sit behind a desk in
her aunt, her great aunt’s school. The great aunt’s
order was the Dominicans. They wore,
like other nuns, wimples, also habits that resembled
shields you’d see on official signs, with lions to the
left/right and coming to a point at the bottom, only Dominicans’ habits
came to a point at the top. They were
big, so when you saw one you knew this is
a nun, a bride of Christ, a clean person. In Blood and
Sand, Valentino is Juan, Spain’s matador, their top-notch
man with the sword and cape in the bullring. Yes,
he’s gored, but ultimately dies for love.
Lila Lee plays the wife/widow,
Nita Naldi the other woman, maybe in life, the other
woman too. They lived hard and fast, vamps.
In one photo, the curve of a hip, Naldi’s
back gets the spotlight, you don’t see
her face. Her dark hair bobbed, her pale
back, curves lovely to look at, and desire?
She’s wearing a sheet. You know that’s all she’s
wearing.
Peter
Mladinic’s fifth book of poems, Voices from the Past, came out in
November 2023 from Better Than Starbucks Publications. An animal rights advocate, he lives
in Hobbs, NM.
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