J.W. Major 

Lovers in the Mall

In love-chairs metal-trapped,
our mouths move above our stillness,
flamingo-legs dangling in socks,
our bodies dead as the future.
O tragic perspective, you groan,
laughing through your drool.
I punch my kneecap inured to jokes,
as you point your dagger nails
across the floor of glowing cave-paint
where a boy in a bowl-shaped haircut
leads his blind father into The Gap.
Jeans for the blind, we cry
in ragged love of our sound,
God dozing through dreams of forces
opposing hope, as we tighten our minds
into words for what we see and are.
Want a Nathan’s? I ask.
You do a tremulous preening.
I tell an anecdote
about being a puppet during therapy
and you lift your slow eyebrows
to retrieve irony from sad thoughts
of guitar music we hear
drifting across shoppers
pressing smiles on us like pennies.

____

J.W. Major’s poems have also appeared in such publications as Comstock Review, Zillah, and Poetry Motel, and stories in Epoch, Prairie Schooner, and The Sun. Major lives in Florida.