Park Bench, by Peter Magliocco

Into the pale light of morning
you must walk again now
knowing minutes tick as atoms
askew in a realm of anti-gravity
taking you to the essence of nowhere
where dogs of war feast on flesh
while you sit by a bombed-out Coffee Bean
pretending to have a spot of java
all that’s inside you encounters a stop
bearing witness to your own dementia
even the pigeons act puzzled by
how you sip a mouthful of air
tasteless & too hot to swallow
from incendiary lingering elements
as you check your watch
(which stopped in the 20th century)
a discarded cell phone dials 911
automatically for anyone’s benefit
in the pale light of morning
memory dissolves under black sun

 

–Published 30th October 2018

 

About Peter Magliocco

Peter Magliocco writes from Las Vegas, Nevada, where he occasionally edits the lit-zine ART:MAG. He has poetry in HARBINGER ASYLUM, MIDNIGHT LANE BOUTIQUE, THE FIVE-TWO, VOX POETICA, DEGENERATE LITERATURE, and elsewhere. He was Pushcart Prize nominated for poetry in 2017 by THE GREENSILK JOURNAL. His latest poetry book is Poems for the Downtrodden Millennium from The Medulla Review Publishing.