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.
