The Literary Review
After the Texas Lounge Closes
Her Ex
Drives to Her House
I’m sorry we sold our house
and your wedding ring’s tucked away.
I didn’t know your going out on me,
all those guys, was only a phase,
a skin adventure, and when I said
I didn’t want you, things would change.
Three AM, I’m ringing your doorbell.
You’re alone, you’re not alone.
I’m sorry I didn’t know us that well,
that in time we’d be in separate houses,
distanced, no reconciliation.
What happens never happens again.
- Pete Mladinic
Negative
Negative, negative, negative,
Don said to Scotty.
Now, nothing to be negative about
for these teachers of math,
Don retired in Utah,
Scotty a name on a stone,
a cemetery dweller
whose home was once a math class,
and a pie-shaped house
that he himself designed.
No negatives side by side with positives,
coming to terms, or not, in some hereafter.
Scotty with his lurching walk,
hospital visits to students
to give them homework.
And Don, once a patient tended by nurses
that were students in his classes.
Don in Utah, Scotty nowhere,
that zero of all zeros, thinner than air,
finer than dust, that house
we see by faith only, or don’t see,
no faith in God; or, in a God
who, withholding a hereafter, is negative.
I recall Don’s rimless glasses, his knack
for compromise,
and Scotty’s gun cabinet,
the fishing rod in his hand at the San Juan
River.
His shadowy voice, sort of deep and
angular,
the Camels smoked occasionally,
the swear words spoken often.
A gay irreverence, not surly
but at times a negative outlook, except,
I suppose, when it came to math.
Some said he was a genius,
could have taught anywhere.
I recall the brace on his knee
from an old basketball injury,
and his last words, my last look
as he shut my pickup’s door
and walked towards his house
which I’d been in, many times.
I recall standing beside him on the Rio
Grande’s banks,
that river that flows between two countries.
- Pete Mladinic
Toddle
You can tell me but I’ll never know
how you felt the moment your son
stood on his own and toddled away
from and then back to you
on the S shaped walk near porch
jalousies and a spruce’s shade
that spilled into the walk he walked
up and down. Happy, a little sad?
His mouth had sucked your nipple
his first days, then that sunny day
outside the house you rented he
stepped away. Baby’s first steps.
Your only son, his hair dark like yours
and his two older sisters’. A time
when, your marriage crumbling,
Jason Tyler followed you past pool
tables and turned a narrow corner.
In a stall in the Ladies you straddled
his lap, faster, harder. Only he
heard you moan, whimper, climaxing.
Jason, blond like your husband, like
your husband, rode a Harley. Unlike
you, he came from money, his family
Tyler Electric. Last time you two spoke
was the A&P. You put a yellow,
black Chock full o’Nuts tin in your cart,
looked up and there he was, tall in
a long dark coat, long hair straggly,
eyes red, a Sunday morning hangover.
You said, “I’m in nursing school.” And
he, “That’s great.” By the time your son
was in the first grade you were single,
a nurse, on your shift the morning
Jason spilled from his Harley on Henley
Road. He lay on the macadam lot of
Stargher’s, with its tinted glass, that sold
smoked meats. A bystander
held his hand, praying as he left her.
Your son Frank recently married.
He’s not ready for children, you said.
I wonder if anyone is ever ready.
- Pete Mladinic
Light and Dark
1
Edison gave us light,
and for that like any sane person
I’m down on my knees thanking him.
But what about Topsy the elephant?
A barker shoved the orange tip
of a smoke up the elephant’s trunk.
She sprained the barker’s foot
or caused him some slight injury and
for that stood in chains outside
a tent. Electricity shot through her.
Edison shook hands with circus higher ups
and ones who did the dark work.
2
So they chained her so she couldn’t move,
couldn’t get away, couldn’t flee, run
for her life, they somehow inserted wires,
to her flanks her chest, hunches. The mass
of her physical presence, a hand threw
a lever, a switch. Edison had it all set, so
the agony start was sudden. How quick.
She didn’t suffer long, the jolts, a hand
threw a switch, bolts of electricity jolted
through her, smoke rose from the ground
but what you can’t see on YouTube is blood
in her eyes blood beneath her ear flaps.
The beginning middle end agony, at least
she didn’t suffer. What an obscene joke,
what a good laugh the sadists had then
as she, chained, went nowhere but down.
Edison didn’t laugh, it was in the interest
of science, to see if it would work, death
by electricity, the pre electric chair days,
before the we’ll strap him into the chair
throw a switch, end this human monster’s
time on earth days. This was an elephant
had kicked a sadist who’d shoved a lit
cigarette up her trunk, for that was killed.
Edison didn’t laugh. The experiment worked.
So an elephant’s one moment here the next
gone. Worked on her, will work on a criminal.
So Edison gave us both light and dark.
Death, destruction, blood in her eyes, blood
pouring out her anus, not on YouTube. We
hear nothing, days before talkies. 1903.
What’s another dead elephant, experiment
a success. Edison felt good. Carcass gone,
time to break out the champagne, toast this
scientific advancement. You don’t see blood
in her eyes. Chains, smoke, her going down.
- Pete Mladinic
Oh Rosemarie
They were buried in separate cemeteries.
Rosemarie Uva, age 31, and her 29 year old
husband Thomas Uva were in their Mercury
Topaz, in heavy traffic and stopped
at a light when each took three bullets.
The Topaz kept rolling and hit a parked car.
Christmas Eve morning. The Uvas were out
last-minute shopping. Ex-cons, for six
months they’d robbed social clubs allegedly
owned by the Mafia. Christmas Eve
in Ozone Park, her police officer brother
had to tell his mother her daughter’s dead.
She had dark brown eyes, long brown hair.
A clear night in December, at the wheel
of the idling Topaz she watched two kids
wearing hoods cross the street.
A jet’s roar faded as the plane climbed.
The radio playing “sittin on the dock..,”
Thomas bolted out the Paradise Club’s door.
His Uzi and a bag filled with cash
and jewelry in back, he got in beside her.
They sped off. Three blocks later, riding
shotgun in a Caddy, James Rocco wrote
on a matchbook the Topaz’s plate number.
- Pete Mladinic