POEM — Awakened She-Wolf

 

He called himself Comrade

and sickened me: after imprisoning

my body for months, he bragged

that he’d haunt me decades later.

I mention him now because I allow

myself to enter new adventures:

pigtails, Canadian bacon and eggs,

black knee boots of lamb leather.

I choose meadows over canyons,

a sizzling steak rather than raw beef.

Yes, he whipped me, proclaimed me his

cadet-prisoner, tightened the proverbial

studded collar around my neck.

He forced me to wear a different hat

every day–straw, panama, fedora–

addressed me as his fuck-fool,

threw me into his hay pit, stripped

and violated me, riding my thighs

until I burned past the suburbs of hell.

He named me She-Wolf, his sex-deity,

and then, one day, I found a slender

triangle of broken mirror on the barn floor,

and, as he mounted me the last time,

I plunged the shard deep into his hairy

back, again and again and again and again

through his black heart, the red poison

splattering on my face before I pushed

him onto the hay beside me and scurried

out the wide, rotting barn doors, naked,

free as a beautiful, awakened she-wolf.

*

David Spicer has had poems in Mad Swirl, Reed Magazine, Slim Volume, The Laughing Dog, In Between Hangovers, The American Poetry Review, Easy Street, Ploughshares, Bad Acid Laboratories, Inc., Yellow Mama, Dead Snakes, and in A Galaxy of Starfish: An Anthology of Modern Surrealism (Salo Press, 2016). He has been nominated for a Pushcart, a Best of the Net, is the author of one full-length collection of poems and four chapbooks, and is the former editor of Raccoon, Outlaw, and Ion Books. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee.