She left parts of
herself with strangers and smalltime celebrities
Her love came in the
anarchy’s rational form
Ambiguous neighbors
starred in their mundane soap operas
Spiders crawled from their
blind corners into martyrdom
“I’m no longer John
the Baptist fascinated by swords”
Ice dancers performed
low-grade pornographic routines
Her world turned
wickedly under the spider’s sacrifice
Her long shadow took a
taxi from the Gilded Age maybe post Kate Chopin
Noah’s rain deepened
in the neighborhood’s belief in starry nights
“I stopped giving dead
dolls to children and telling them to pretend”
A long empty street
stalked a cold Sunday’s ancient theatre and two car garages
The neighbors gathered
to treat Jesus like an exiled philosopher
Love no longer looked
like love with those spider-cracks in its glass heart
Tom Gribble
was awarded an Artist Thrust Fellowship and the Associated Writing Programs
Intro to Journals for poetry. His work has appeared in Spectrum, Chattahoochee Review, and Hawaii Review. He is the managing editor of Gribble Press.