Richard Magahiz

Poetry

 

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Dreams of Yuggoth

 

a vapor hiss

cnidarian not-black

black

and then you spot those

three-lobed sockets  

 

blind mouth sucking

the midgut a twist

of mirrors

to sire their parents  

these eat their young  

 

sloughing dead pixels,

salt risen

demons of Ptah

voices each decanted

from bell jars

 

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those that are lost

 

behind 

the cyclopean structure 

a millworks 

its central shaft 

ringed with dripping chains

 

each lovely necklace:   

even white teeth

too many blushing virgins

not enough

coonhounds

 

we gave them love,   

this,   

this is how they consume us  

cleaved to our breast 

a squirming pink mass  

 

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Metamorphosis 2

 

I dreamed that Ovid had come back to earth

in a film starring Olympia Dukakis

teaching in a small liberal arts college

about the themes of transformation in

Mothra and Neon Genesis Evangelion

and not well liked by her dean or department head

(played well by Matthew McConnaughey)

but tenured and therefore not dependent

on living on the pin money from poetry.

Ovid/Olympia would get into trouble

writing a piece in a leftist zine

about how overnight a dark-skinned woman

who swept floors and polished bannisters

at the college totally anonymously

was turned into a non-human creature

completely without any prosthetics

only a trick of lighting and a little makeup

and had to be driven from the place she lived

possibly to be shot in the legs in some desert

because people like her would have to

go back where they had originally come from

and somewhere a troll on Youtube wrote a hit piece

in the reality of my dream movie

of how this taxpayer funded college

was allowing social justice warriors

like Ovid/Olympia to make horrible statements

against this country which ought to be cherished

and managed to dox the professor

and once this got onto Twitter and Facebook

became an overnight controversy

that Matthew McConaughey could not

sweep under the rug like some dust

and so would ask his troublesome teacher

to take a semester's leave without pay.

By this point, I was wide awake in bed

and don't remember what happened at the end

of this dream movie, whether it was happy

or whether because it was art was therefore sad.

 

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their Lili Marleen

 

into longwave    

their vision we cannot 

hide here  

 

twins beeswax pale their psyches are one

 

in your skull,   

deep amber waves...    

in everyone's skull   

 

the sky cracks;  the schoolchildren can't breathe   

 

Richard Magahiz has a day job working with computers, originally as a physicist but more recently as a software engineer. When it comes to music, food, or books his tastes are both eclectic and idiosyncratic. He spent a long time on the East Coast of the US but has come back to his native state of California. His work has appeared recently at Star*Line, Dreams and Nightmares, Failed Haiku, otoliths, bones, Uppagus, Kaleidotrope, and Eye to the Telescope. His website is at https://zeroatthebone.us/

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