A Tale of Two Toothpicks
A wooden toothpick tried to talk me into
taking drugs. It twisted my arm to look at porn.
I walked two Dobermans down a dark alley.
I snorted lines of coke through a rolled dollar
bill in a moll’s digs and later that night
at The Dazzling Disco.
You could say the wooden toothpick
was a bad influence, or that it doesn’t exist.
I’m just making it up, like someone making up
a religion, not a good religion but one
of the crazy ones to pretend we never die.
The wooden toothpick made me do it.
The plastic toothpick told me to be myself.
I thought of a scary bridge over a river,
and me in a car going onto and up the bridge
toppling off the bridge,
a blue-green parrot tattooed on the forearm
of a felon surnamed Lockhart,
penguins like wobbly tuxedos, a parrot
uncaged in a kitchen, Lisa’s pecked cheek’s
trickle of blood, the friendly toothpick’s ruby
color, and my gold Dodge Colt
descending into a field
of grass with you, my one passenger.
Mike’s Cousin
He lived near the woods,
somewhere in East Texas.
He grew up with guns.
He grew up hunting
rabbits, squirrels, birds,
and deer. He was good
with rifles and pistols,
a good shot, a good hunter.
He got so good with a gun
that eventually he left
the gun at home and took
a knife into the woods
and with a knife-throw
felled rabbits and deer.
He had good eyesight,
good timing, knew
to be in the right place
at the right time. Yet one
moment in dead of night
in a chair in his living room
he died from some allergy
that Mike explained,
an allergy that plagued
his cousin for years, all
the way back to childhood?
I’m not sure. I only know
that’s how he died
and in the woods, at first
with the gun, then the knife,
he was animated, keen
to sights and sounds, and
most always he emerged,
having hit the moving
target, fully alive.
— Peter Mladinic’s most recent book of poems, Maiden Rock, is available from the UnCollected Press. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, United States.