{"id":7062,"date":"2016-02-03T19:11:17","date_gmt":"2016-02-04T02:11:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/?page_id=7062"},"modified":"2016-02-03T19:11:17","modified_gmt":"2016-02-04T02:11:17","slug":"two-poems-2","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/?page_id=7062","title":{"rendered":"Two poems"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Spicer<\/strong><\/p>\n

Not What We Expected<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll reveal this: when she and I felt
\nlike gluttons and punished ourselves,
\nwe ate and drank in The Purgatory Caf\u00e9,<\/em>
\na dive where pictures of dolphins
\nand unicorns floated on walls
\nand Cuban fishermen argued
\nabout terrorized islanders. The place
\npleased us with the faint smell
\nof fried sausage, and a blind woman
\nin a cotton dirndl decorated with daisies
\nplayed the oboe on a small stage, a pail for tips
\nnext to her. Suddenly the door opened to voices
\nobscured by smoke and fog and revealed,
\nin a white robe, a bearded child
\nwith a few followers. He carried a cross
\ncarved from a wooden rocket and a dancer\u2019s
\npole. My skin tingled and we scoffed
\nfor a moment before he spoke:
\nI\u2019ve returned to the fires and jungles
\nof your world, I\u2019m the rebel you\u2019ve
\nwaited for, so kneel and pray, run
\nwith me, scrounge no longer,
\nthe mathematics of this scorched
\nplanet will arrive soon, but I am here.<\/em><\/p>\n

Termination at the Crime Scene<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

We salvaged the wheelchair
\nand one shoe in a ditch at twilight
\non the Okie-Texas line. Where was the vic?
\nAn enigma. Somebody phoned me.
\nA woman who wept every other word.
\nI was the lead, Green the secondary.
\nClimbing out of the drooping earth,
\nwe organized a search party,
\nfound the corpse under the moonlit maple
\nnext to an old horse with a bullet
\nin its head. The stiff had a gunshot wound
\nto the brain, swelled like a cocoon,
\nplaying cards rolled up and stuck in his nose.
\nA hypo in his big toe. The stink astonished
\nGreen with its wicked texture. Ah shit,<\/em>
\nbetween you and I, it\u2019s a heroin OD.
\nYou\u2019re not paid to think, moron,<\/em> I admonished,
\nbanishing him then and there. After his bad
\ngrammar, for all I cared Green could\u2019ve been
\nvines sprouting from a tea kettle
\nor a papoose with a pacifier in its mouth.<\/p>\n

DAVID SPICER<\/strong> has had poems accepted by or published in American Poetry Review<\/em>, Ploughshares<\/em>, Yellow Mama<\/em>, Bop Dead City<\/em>, unbroken<\/em>, The Curly Mind<\/em>, Slim Volume<\/em>, The Naugatuck River Review<\/em>, Yellow Chair Review<\/em>, and elsewhere. He is the author of one full-length collection, Everybody Has a Story<\/em>, and four chapbooks. He is the former editor of raccoon<\/em>, Outlaw<\/em>, and Ion Books. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Spicer Not What We Expected I\u2019ll reveal this: when she and I felt like gluttons and punished ourselves, we ate and drank in The Purgatory Caf\u00e9, a dive where pictures of dolphins and unicorns floated on walls and Cuban … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"parent":7057,"menu_order":5,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-7062","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P15duy-1PU","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7062"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7062\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7096,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7062\/revisions\/7096"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}