Lovers in the Mall J.W. Major   Major Page 1 In love-chairs metal-trapped, our mouths move above our stillness, flamingo-legs dangling in socks, our bodies dead as the future. O tragic perspective, you groan, laughing through your drool. I punch my kneecap inured to jokes, as you point your dagger nails across the floor of glowing cave-paint where a boy in a bowl-shaped haircut leads his blind father into The Gap. Jeans for the blind, we cry in ragged love of our sound, God dozing through dreams of forces opposing hope, as we tighten our minds into words for what we see and are. Want a Nathan's? I ask. You do a tremulous preening. I tell an anecdote about being a puppet during therapy and you lift your slow eyebrows to retrieve irony from sad thoughts of guitar music we hear drifting across shoppers pressing smiles on us like pennies. J.W. Major's poems have also appeared in such publications as Comstock Review, Zillah, and Poetry Motel, and stories in Epoch, Prairie Schooner, and The Sun. Major lives in Florida.