Summer
by
Pete Mladinic
I am Rosendo Rodriguez. Fluent
in English
and Spanish, I also speak German, French,
and
Italian. I graduated from Texas Tech
with a B.A. in Art History, my main interest,
17th Century Egyptian painting and sculpture.
With a love for travel, I visited
Egypt and hope
to go back. I am interested in architecture,
and
am earning a master’s degree online
in architectural engineering. I am an inmate
at the Texas correctional facility in Huntsville.
If you
are a woman between twenty and forty,
with a college degree, I would love to make
your acquaintance, and correspond through
letters. Should we find mutual
compatibility
in our epistolary friendship, I’d like to
meet
in person. A warm person, I like children
and
animals, and living life to the fullest.
Also, I think you will like my smile and dark
good looks. I’ve been told I am handsome,
but it’s
what’s inside a person that counts.
The ashes of Rosendo Rodriguez, I blow
over the landfill outside Lubbock,
Texas,
where a suitcase with Summer Baldwin’s
remains
was found. The marine reservist
I was, before I was given a lethal injection .
. .
I drove her out here, after beating her
to
a pulp. She was a sex worker. It wasn’t sex
I
wanted. But to batter and kill. Two months
pregnant, alive, when I stuffed her in the
suitcase, this landfill is where she died,
among these mounds of garbage
I, the ashes
of Rosendo, blow about, aimless. A clean-cut
marine,
he looked like an altar boy, a young
man any mother would love to meet. Summer
wanted to be a beautician. She loved
her young son, who has outlived
her twenty-
seven years. One night at a 7-11 she got into
a
Ford 150 pick up. The John seemed polite.
A gentleman, opening the passenger door.
“Glad to meet you, my name’s Rosendo.”
The Setting on Fire of Michael Menson in London in 1997
by Pete Mladinic
It makes me want to hear the snores of my
small
terrier as he lies beside me,
or the sound of rain in a river
It makes me want to turn to things
other than the night he was on
the wrong bus
and got off, and the three males, one white,
two
brown, beat him and poured fluid
on him because he was Black, and he ran
down the street with his back on fire
and died six days later in a hospital
It makes me want to turn away and go
to Wikipedia for the facts, for
the outcome
of the trial where justice was dealt
but
not served really, the lenient
sentences for two, the life sentence
for one makes me angry for this hate crime
makes me angry for the Menson
family
had to push and push
at first
the police said it was suicide
then there were new police
and commentators on TV said
things are better now we’re more prepared
An off-duty fireman who saw Michael
and stopped
and before that there was a phone booth
Michael went into to try to put
out the fire
part of that booth’s metal melted
On the Death of Det. Sgt. Monica
Mosley
by Pete Mladinic
She was Black, and only 51,
and had
served Cumberland County.
She was doing the world some good.
Some thugs
broke into her home.
The only way I can describe them,
thugs,
low-life’s, likely addicts, thieves.
Please don’t hand me that malarkey
people aren’t bad, it’s the things they do.
For the murderers to be caught, tried
and executed wouldn’t bring
her back.
The executed wouldn’t happen.
So
you killed a cop. So we don’t murder
people who murder people,
who murdered this person. We
don’t hate the murderer.
We hate
the heinous act. Okay, that’s your right.
As
for me, I hope the thugs go to prison
and get fucked up the ass, and feel
excruciating pain. Her body’s
in a funeral home. Think of the
pain
her loved ones feel, and will feel
at the
viewing. And please don’t hand me
that malarkey thug is racist.
If you feel it is, it is. This police officer
was murdered. Justice needs to
happen
so the murderers aren’t out in five years,
free
to kill another cop, another child.
For
Al Maginnes
by Peter Mladinic
As Covid
restrictions relaxed, and we
slowly started to break out of our shells,
I
resumed going to the local wellness center:
a gym plus, that
includes a big play area
for children, indoors soccer and track.
The
other day, on a sit-down peddle machine
I looked up at the
second tier of the track
and thought: that power-walker is Sam.
Yesterday, I saw her again, she wasn’t Sam.
Only
the other day I was so sure, and eager
to rekindle a
friendship that had begun when
we were breaking out of our Covid shells
and
one morning in the gym I met Sam, a tall,
lithe brunette in
a Yankees soft-cloth cap.
God, she was beautiful! Young enough to be
my
granddaughter, married, with a toddler
daughter, and another child on the way.
One
of those people of whom you’d say
they are beautiful
on the outside and inside.
We talked baseball. Her husband had pitched
in
college. We talked about exercise, some
mornings we talked
about nothing, but Sam
was as easy with me as I was with her.
Then
I stopped going in the mornings
but one morning came back. Sam was like,
“Hey,
where’ve you been?” The last time we
spoke, the last
time I saw her. Already two
years past. Had Sam wanted to lean in
and
be closer, would I have pulled back? No.
But she wouldn’t
have leaned in. She
seemed happy in her roles of wife, mother,
and
friend. That last time, she said “friend.”
There was never “I just like you as a friend.”
I
felt her friendship, a warm light radiating
from a being as
beautiful as any Playboy
centerfold I ogled in my youth. Yesterday,
when
I knew the second-tier power-walker
wasn’t Sam, I was
reading a Trollope novel:
Lady Arabella, trying to thwart a marriage
between
her son and Mary Thorne, tells Mary
“You have nothing to bring to the marriage.”
Mary
thinks: I have nothing to bring, nothing
to give him? I
have myself! She’s so justly
affronted by her fiancé’s mother’s
remark.
She has no money (so she thinks) but she
has
everything to give. Sam gave me
everything. I’d be
fortunate to be at her side
in the gym, or, for that matter, anywhere.
