Live Nude Poems

D’S BLUES The backyard was sun-kissed, better than death. a sun kissed lawn always better than death. and he came back on the way he had left. He came back in a way he had left. It was hard, but the sun was better in this yard. He came back, he came back the way he had left:to take the Kiss stay away from death. Dennis Mahagin is a writer from Washington state. Many of his poems have appeared online, and in print, via two published poetry collections: “Grand Mal,” and “Longshot & Ghazal,” Dennis also serves as the poetry editor for Frigg magazine.

Deer Lodge And I’m grateful for that autumn morning you helped me out at the dump: it was so cold I couldn’t feel my fingers or my toes! Yet you hopped right in the truck bed, trampling the slick black bags of trash; you kicked the shit out of the tail gate, you kicked the fuck out of of the two by fours, right there where the sun had a name for the coming hail it despised, and it was bent nails, and friend, spent oil and rust; my mom had just died and the season was far too far and long gone. Another Eddy Money song came on the radio; I turned it up to ten again. I was strung out on pills, and kept a couple always melded between the cotton tongue and the roof of the mouth. Smiling sideways at me making the best of things behind my wheel, you tapped on the back window when the wind came up— a sneaking hunch or sucker punch one can only feel, a harbinger, oil-soaked floorboards or anybody’s bullsh...

Limerick for Kennewick There once was a kid from Kennewick who longed for a plain friend with benefits. Like trains that couple simply to live —with perfect names to kiss and sit beside—in the sweet tart afterglow of astride he longed for even the shortest of rides, and he said simply this—half to him- self, diminished, and half to the one he plain missed; the one who came through Kennewick. Dennis Mahagin is the author of two poetry collections—Grand Mal, from Rebel Satori Press, and Longshot & Ghazal, from Mojave River Press. He also works with Ellen Parker to edit the online magazine called Frigg, and he owns and operates a music store in Deer Lodge, Montana.

Don’t Want   Air Sickness is a walk in the park compared to  withdrawal, they say we are free to  move, to fall about the cabin.  I have a nightmare I meet her boyfriend while standing in line at the Walgreens pharmacy;  he lets me know in low, burning tones the way she likes it, the way it was going to stay, he said, lightly gripping my elbow like a prison guard leading a skel back to his cell. “she makes me crazy enough to bust a motherfucker,”  he says, “and you don’t want that, you don’t  want it here, right?” I shake my head, then nod, as my turn comes  at the Walgreens window;  the pharmacist slides my package  across the counter. We hit it, that  turbulence, more and more  turbulence, yet the woman in question stays right there,  in my mind,  a kind of living grief in bas relief;  then I’m back  on...

Asterisk when the bongos  go missing, some thief  made of alter ego and afterthought brushes the yellow Cobain cowlick out of his eyes, ducked down  behind the side door of a Portland pawn shop  —this percussionist  who sneaks around wearing the torn  to shit lumberjack  shirt, holding on to a fifty  like a heart beat in the stiffest breeze, and his guilty glance , simply a squeezed frame, it says these beats  basically the same, yet gone now and forever  gone, the beat like an add-on that the dead can’t put their finger on—go ahead, switch  to castanets  instead, I say,  and bottle caps—tubular bells  such as them that exist in The Exorcist, a thousand little whispers  like pop rocks from the backfire  of a flame, and a hearse: they say we missed you today in church, we missed you we missed you, astral  ...

How To Make It w/ a ‘62 Reissue Japanese Fretless Jazz Bass Plug her in easy, easy, yet with deliberate reverence, there’s a click halfway between shove and pluck, just above a patch of hum, and the stick… to love   her you must play some natural now lick the tip of your paisley diamond hard McCartney plectrum, then whip it away. Keep the EQ flat, but push volume between nine or ten; don’t think about the Mongoloid prodigy banjo boy from Deliverance, his ghoulish sockets, hootenanny whites under iris, shameful dungarees cum doom, and neither go near the line from Don Henley’s Sunset Grille , your talent isn’t there, and maybe never, yet still possessed of enough heart for foreplay, vibrato and the effort that kills… hammer on, tremolo, trill… pull off a thing between the tongue and teeth, the ninth and thirteenth phantom frets, so little time left, as your wind moans the lip of a bottl...