Three Poems by Peter Magliocco

Catacomb Gods in the Dark Star Cave

Cave walls became prehistoric canvas
the naked buffalo goddess danced on
as warriors set out to hunt her
fire burned any trespassing lovers
with loins morphing animalistic
shapes the artist's brush captured
to crystallize his voyeur's gaze

Not yet fully humane nor human
enough to fete any aesthetic color
beyond the slaughtered deer's red
blood coruscating in polymorphic vision
as divine beast-like rocks empowered
rose from those stalagmite shadows
to crucify graven images of fallen man



Finding a Wormhole in the Light of Ages

What conceives the photon's rash
ascension into a mind drunk
with darkness?
To sit somewhere
on a razed portico
wind abrades with time's polish
over my private statuary
of bony rock

& know, despite everything,
what carries a dreamer's mind
back to its elemental beginning

is teleportation of thought-waves
in the electromagnetic field
growing between us:

For all creatures, alive or dead,
sit here with me drinking the night
air's falling rain cloud
(sweet with energy's stir)
of neo-sentient consciousness,

waiting for the light years
of divine knowledge
to see our earth again.



Convict Lake

I want to tell you how the cold
whittled into my bones at night
as speckled brown trout slept
in umber heavy lake currents
slowly gravitating dark grottoes

the stalking eyes of crabs see
traipsing with jerky slithers
into the lake's muddy bottom
mirroring floating seaweed souls
while, above in the lake parking lot,

two frigid boys shiver wide-awake
submerged by a visionless cell
in the icy hull of a '57 Ford wagon
with whitened windows frost-caked
where my cousin & myself cry

from nerve-numb bluing pains--
& a damning adult punishment
for being inept little fishermen,
now bait for waiting aqua gods
the lake's true nature crowns

Peter Magliocco writes from Las Vegas, Nevada, where he occasionally edits the lit-zine ART:MAG.  He has poetry in Harbinger Asylum, Poetry Life and Times, VOX Poetica, Midnight Lane Boutique, In Between Hangovers, and elsewhere.  Recently nominated for a poetry Pushcart Prize by The Greensilk Journal, his latest poetry book is Poems for the Downtrodden Millennium via The Medulla Review Publishing.