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Zumpe, Lee Clark |
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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.
Peter Mladinic’s fourth book of poems, Knives
on a Table, is available from Better Than Starbucks Publications. An animal rights
advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico.
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