Seven O’ Nine Sez: Technology Can’t Stand Up To An Old Fashioned Flogging

By Dennis Mahagin

On the hood
of her tan Lexus,
she pinched me
hard and good
in brachial
plexus: “You’ve got
a lot of fucking
nerve,” she
said.

With bad
hand, my evil
self grabbed up
a hot purple
Blackberry

Curve, tried texting
my neuro surgeon pal
Matthew Guelph, but the thing
was the ring tone had died, I was plum
alone up there, on the hood ornamental
as a Deep Space
Nine screensaver.

“Would you trust me
with a Bic razor?” she
asked, as we worked
our way up

the windshield glass,
slithery bodies
silvery as chrome
glint.

Let’s just say
I was weary of pottery
classes, navel lint, Trekkie
conventions, scratch n’ sniff
lottery tickets …I wanted her best
Jerry Ryan to slap my nerd
glasses off,
make my bare
ass speak softly
as a squee
gee, as Emily
Dickinson with
lemon wax cuticle on a
super nova paperweight.

Say we
aspired to snow angels
more formidable than any wipers
known to desire, when she broke
off my radio antenna, whipped
a useless Verizon smart phone
into the tall grass, I begged and
begged her for broader

horizons, to tan my
ass silly, to simply
make me out
a better
man.