Poetry

Aaron Mello photo

By

Jeremy Spears

Sideshow

The invalid’s missives arrive in rubber bands, some unstamped,

announcing addresses like mirrors that fail to repeat.

The mailmen understand something’s going on.

In the struggle to make right, something’s gone wrong.

Since the attack, she doesn’t remember much

but her fixation is strangely renewed.

In how many ways must you turn her away and in how many

shades, how many hues?  She’s writing to bring feeling

back to her hands.  The problem is you love her too much,

this sweet being dangling at the end of memory,

her once bountiful scroll collapsed to a spider’s scrawl

staining precocious stationery.  Cursive words limp like dying balloons.

When at last she departs, no one will contact you, made

uncomfortable as ever by her curious passion.

The gossips crowded you, hollow as circus barkers:

noise profoundly announced, without courage or context,

lacking news.  Where does that story start?

Art begets pain.  Pain begets art.

Over the phone with your latest love, your wanderlust

cries San Felipe! San Felipe next! conjuring a night

in Puerto Penasco where you stole lines from

vatos off the top of a filthy urinal

then dropped acid with a kiss-worthy stranger on that

foreign beach.  A moonlit ocean never looked so good.

Waves gobbled sand, spitting voracious incantations,

wide-mouthed witnesses on a dissolving dance-floor.  Come,

Inviolate.  Welcome to our sideshow where every attraction

is a freak, where we flaunt what we seek

and every swell of desire tangles in itself,

falling each to each.

Fete

Look how that looker struts

like a hooker

wobbling ahead on a heel that’s loose.

It’s only right she looks dynamite.

After all, she is the chanteuse.

We watched her last night in the Alley of Stars

where candlelight and Coronitas

revealed sideburnitas and pantyhose scarred.

This morning, she’s searching for more

than the throne dollar-billed.

Rattling pick-ups slow down at her glory,

such otherness, such unfathomable thrill.

In this city’s kitchens, tiny roaches

scurry a ravenous fete.

Disaster, as always, is the safest bet.

With a spatula, I squash them while frying

machaca too authentic to speak.

Why do I come here? Do I find what I seek?

Brunch retired and so inspired I cavort

around the apartment wearing

only my magical oxblood cowboy boots,

unwittingly conjuring the demon from you.

Ten times craved, his six pistons blaze.

Afterward, every crackling nerve is heard.

I sizzle stem to root.

Lover, pitted roads surround us, smoking dirt.

Carriages quake as their axles vibrate.

Was each unseemly urgency served?

In our window, the cat chatters

at a circling bird.

Jeremy Spears

My poems have appeared in Five2one, The MockingHeart Review, The Furious Gazelle, the Green Mountains Review and Wordgathering, among others. I am a recipient of the David Lindahl Prize from the JWR.