Five Poems by Richard Magahiz

 

Liminal 

 

Every cemetery is a birthing place. 

You give up your feet to try another way, 

you leave the land to someone else 

 

where you're afraid to make mistakes 

or be left alone without a friend. 

But this threshold's a split gasp, 

 

a place to cough one true name. 

Every graveyard wreath's a newborn's wrap. 

The space you occupied passes along.

 

 

The migration of the blessed 

 

It is not governed by any earthly cycle, 

the massing of the great wings, 

interpenetrating like rays of a prism 

and the light that is felt as sound. 

 

They do not leave the court they serve 

nor move from any fixed place 

but move according to their tribes 

an altogether different order from us. 

 

I alone can see them, majestic, 

piebald reticulations vast and slow, 

as slow as the answer to prayers 

and wide as the innocent heart. 

 

 

I'm going there 

 

  Avid enough  

to want to enter  

every cell of yours  

shouldering aside  

the mitochondria. 

  Loco enough  

to steal your ecstasy   

from any four-letter  

ground of being. 

 

  I am intent on you  

with pit viper focus,  

on that warm body,  

reeking with blood heat. 

  Some five liters  

throb beneath your hide,  

a full two and a half  

bottles of maroon 

Cherry Cola, warm. 

 

  You don't know it,  

but I stare into your eyes  

to see the rods and cones, 

so partaking in the 

surface of your brain.  

  Can one lose reason   

from too much pheromone?  

Can one die 

breathing in too little? 

 

  The best thing  

that came from the   

primordial muck is you, 

one continuous strand  

sliding down from the ooze. 

  By this Tijuana Bible! 

If they were to swab  

my diary they'd find  

your genome on each page.

 

 

(Untitled) 

 

moons seven  

through twenty-nine 

these aerial people who never  

set foot on red soil, 

their scaly prows

 

 

Plea 

 

My fingerprints have gone wandering, Your Honour 

without my permission at all. 

The wives of powerful people, 

might also be implicated, at least 

the arms they use, their hands on loan, 

and maybe a dose of something 

thousands of times stronger than heroin. 

I cannot account for my right index finger 

who I think should be locked up 

somewhere with matte surfaces, 

plus I intend to have a word with those pinkies 

who are old enough to do better. 

Some sort of treaty they forged, 

such traitorous, uncivil digits? 

No, that wasn't me at all. 

I was home, watching something funny on my tablet 

eating fresh biscotti with chai. 

The fingerprints have retained counsel 

and some self-styled publicist 

that I am obliged to pay myself.

Richard Magahiz tries to live an ordered life in harmony with all things natural and created but one that follows unexpected paths. He's spent much of his time wrangling computers as a day job but is now working on a way to center life around other things. His work has appeared at Star*Line, Dreams and Nightmares, Sein und Werden, Uppagus, Bewildering Stories, and Abyss and Apex. His website is at https://zeroatthebone.us/