After eight straight sunny days, with bare clavicles
pink-tinted as candy canes, Pike Street people keep
thinking positive in wrap-around Vuarnet
sunglasses, especially
the Wallingford gals with teardrop frames
and pinafores, down at the Public Fish Market.
Rhinestone barnacles cling to their lens rims,
they call the hop sing sushi boys by Blues Bro names, curtsy,
and drop their granny glasses an inch below the nose bridge,
rifling buckskin, pushing sound around:
Hey, you’re awful cute Jake,
but what does it take for a Seattle girl
to get some Sockeye?
Wallingford babes chew Bubblicious, they’ve come to soak
sun, and watch the flying fishes. Meanwhile, Ray-Ban Ninjas
nod and grin, tossing king salmon back and forth
like Sumo medicine balls.
Outside, on the pier, for the eighth straight day,
two mimes pray like manta rays, with twin monocle mirrors
for catching the sun glint, slippery as sequins wrapped in upside-
down ok signs. Dad's what I'm talkin' about! cries a five-year old
boy, perched on the shoulders of a poker-faced Akroyd clone.
Pike Street people
have got to believe; they High-Five, holding
their iced lattes at arm's length, careful not to spill
a sweet drop of this drought. Back up the Pike,
photogenic Filipinos take butcher’s block choppers to a row
of slimy Cohos, while the Wallingford girls get ready to go:
Awwwww, Mary, just SO! . . . See it thru,
see the world, Rose! Now. . . let’s wrap it up
for sunny Sally. . . Just one more time, Joe!
Dennis Mahagin is a writer from the state of Washington. His poems and stories appear in magazines such as Exquisite Corpse, 3 A.M., 42opus, Thieves Jargon, Juked, Storyglossia, Absinthe Literary Review, Pequin, Keyhole, FRiGG, Rumble Microfiction, Underground Voices, and Stirring: A Literary Collection. A first book of his poems, entitled Grand Mal, is forthcoming from Rebel Satori Press.
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