Sal, the girl dwarf, dressed in rags.
All the easier to grope and screw
her, Bear the Baker, grizzly huge,
bragged. I love to keep them
blindfolded for hours in sunlight.
He discarded her, his first ex-wife,
because of club feet. Bear sagged
in the hammock touching the ground.
He altered women I’d bring him,
forced them to waltz. They wore
a different wig every day, ate meals
of pretzels and a vodka drink, Magic Debris.
I delivered him ten beauties who died
of various maladies: breast cancer,
dementia, diabetes. When they tried
to flee, he forced them to eat powdered glass,
hog-tied them to steel beams in his basement.
Nice enough to supply blankets.
Harvest, orange-haired scarecrow, escaped
in a customer’s truck. Two years later, dressed
as Mata Hari, she returned to Bear, who stared
at this magnificence, called her his ski champion.
Powerless, he plunged into depression,
visited shrinks, failed to flourish.
One day Harvest built a sawed-off,
blew off Bear’s head, stuck it on the wall
with his other trophies. She spared me,
the best damned taxidermist in the county.
David Spicer has had poems accepted by or published in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Curly Mind, Slim Volume, Yellow Chair Review, Jersey Devil Press, and elsewhere. He is the author of one full-length collection and four chapbooks and is the former editor of raccoon, Outlaw, and Ion Books. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee.