David Spicer

Mulberries and Spiders

If I exhumed memories of you,
I’d recall your soliloquy about the Pope
munching mulberries on our chocolate
sofa, how he flopped down, coughed,
and watched the crocodile lick the griffin.
You admitted that cocoon of a tale
was a lie, but we laughed about it
for years. Then the time you dressed
in nothing but cobalt scarves that covered
your delicious body parts, your sandy hair
unraveled on the ferry near a town called
Venice. I loved the hieroglyphic wind
and loons that decorated your loins as you
opened to me: our jacklights barely shined
in the lagoon and a moth landed between us
as we both slipped into rhythmic silence.
What happened next? I think we entered
dawn’s colors with echoes of each other
moaning in the morning. Now, I sit on that
same sofa, survive day to day, little snags
in my thoughts winking at each other.
Beyond the canal two miles away,
a gull waves to another gull just as I
can’t recall the last words you spoke,
your fever frying the spider that
crawled on your forehead, and you
sleeping for the rest of my life.

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David Spicer has published poems in The American Poetry Review, CircleStreet, Gargoyle, Moria, Oyster River Pages, Ploughshares, Remington Review, Santa Clara Review, The Sheepshead Review, Steam Ticket, Synaeresis, Third Wednesday and elsewhere. Nominated for a Best of the Net three times and a Pushcart twice, he is author of six chapbooks, the latest being Tribe of Two (Seven CirclePress). His third and fourth full-length collections, American Maniac (Hekate Publishing) and Confessional (Cyberwit.net), are now available. He lives in Memphis. His website is http://www.davidspicer76.com.