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Mime Magnet


ISSUE:  Summer 2020

 

I wonder. Yes, I’m looking up as I say this,
I wonder if I do have a superpower. Maybe
I have more than one aspect of attraction, 
this knack for drawing others in close, almost 
touching me. Not just mimes, but street 
dancers, magicians, missionaries standing 
on buckets and looking out over the crowd
and catching my eye, you know those people 
who cast a line out and hook someone, that’s 
me, the hooked, seeing the hustle danced
and twirled and shuffled beside Lorca’s hands 
statued and holding a bird like a flower last 
night in Plaza Santa Ana and I couldn’t look 
away from the handsome man in dreads 
looking at me from across that circle, and
when he lifted his shirt, flirted, shared with me 
his muscled chest and fatless stomach, I didn’t 
step back from him or turn to run like one night 
in La Paz Bolivia…yes, I’m serious, La Paz 
Bolivia has mimes too and one chased me 
across a plaza in front of a laughing crowd
and I ran and left my wife also laughing at me 
like she did the first time in Gasteiz a quarter 
century ago, yes, that long, as the mime wove 
his way through row after row of circled crowd 
and found me at the back already thinking,
He’s not coming to me, he can’t see me, but I
am seen and superpowers can be a curse. Friends
I know are magnets of pain, of suffering, from
fists, from loss, from men, you know how that works, 
they are found, that which hurts them is drawn
to them. I wonder how to relieve them of that power. 

 

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