FreezeRay:  Poetry With A Pop
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SEAN PATRICK MULROY

nintendo, 1989


Shag carpeting, a static
               coiling underneath our feet.
Our feet a cloud of white sock rabbits sprinting
                              up the stairs and down the hallway
                to the boys’ room.

                Parents, young and poor,
having not yet made their fabulous new fortunes, pooling money
                                to buy rectangular pizzas for us,
               hiring delivery men to race our adolescent pulses
                              with 2 liter bottles of generic Mt. dew.  

We eat ourselves sick, lounging
                in the blue glow of the television’s rounded face.  

                              Allowing it to blot imagination
                with impressive clouds
                                                           of 8bit ink,  
cramming the controllers in between our sunless palms
                where, clicking, they nibble at the corners
                               of our Sunday afternoon.

                Phil peels off his shirt and tosses it on to the dresser, by the row
of golden trophies and the cast from Rich’s broken leg,
signed by the entire soccer team.

                I’m waiting on the bed, for my turn,
                but I’m not really looking forward to it.

The game they’re playing,
               I know that I’ll be bad at it.  I know the boys
                                                          will never let me win. 

the vhs tapes for kids

belonged on the bottom shelf   
               (the one without the glass) because
               they were mine.  

Each an odd collage of free-to-try cable
and after-school specials from the network.

My family still has them; a reminder of the days
when we had less and my sister, Emily, and I sat
                together watching a parade
                of our most beloved distractions: 

My Little Ponies: The Movie.  My Little Ponies : The Movie 2.
Mary Poppins
, with the 1-800 number
               for the Disney Channel tickering beneath.  

Also, an hour long documentary on dinosaurs called

                               Dinosaurs!  

full of long-obsolete facts
              about longer-obsolete creatures, hosted
                             by a still-walking Christopher Reeve(!)
and peppered with gruesome claymation monstrosities
               eating the fuck out of each other--

I remember that one especially well
               because it was so terrifying.  
                              But even though I was afraid,
I did not wander through our quiet house to find
my mother, though I’m sure
                                I would have rather spent the afternoon with her
instead of watching for the millionth time
               the tinny rendition of Annie  we had bootlegged,
run through with commercials
and missing the first song, “Maybe”
                                                            (which remains my favorite).  

                Television
was the doorstep that my parents left me on
with promises of their return.

While they were busy living out the last hours
of their secret lives,
                 it watched over me.
It told me stories. It bathed me
                             in its multicolored light.


Born and raised in Southern Virginia, the house where Sean Patrick Mulroy grew up was built in 1801 and was commandeered by the union army during the civil war to serve as a makeshift hospital. As a boy, Sean loved to peel back the carpets to show where the blood from hasty surgeries on wounded soldiers had stained the wooden floorboards. Now he writes poems. He is a 2013 Lambda Literary Fellow, and his work has been published or is forthcoming in The Bakery, Assaracus, Rua de Baixo, Network Awesome, Moonshot, Side B, Union Station, Tandem, Frigg, Neon, Best Indie Literature of New England, qu.ee/r, and Ganymede.
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