~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Guardian Angel

In the back seat of my father’s rusty Nash Rambler
with a brother and two sisters, I hit bossy Dorothy,
who’d called me Stupid moron, on the arm with my fist.
She screamed louder than Susan Hayward in The Snake Pit.

My father braked the car to a screech on the shoulder
of Highway 70 between Eads and Memphis, ordered,
Get out, boy! I knew what awaited me, opened the door,
began to climb out when I heard the tractor trailer’s horn:

BWAHHHHHHHHHHH! It missed me by half a foot—
I felt the ghost of the truck’s speed on the two-lane road
as I heard my father holler, Get the hell back in here!

Dazed, I hurried onto the seat before I heard him mutter
to my mother, who wore a frown, I would’ve never forgiven
myself, and I thanked the guardian angel that spared me.

What the Good Angel Said to Robert Johnson at the Crossroads

If you’ve met the seducer of the naïve,
the one who will teach you to sing the blues
for your creative doubt like a fallen saint, or who
can show you the way to tune talent’s guitar,
trust me and the patina of unrequited love you
carry like a relentless fire, hide your proud star
in my feathered suit I call wisdom, and discard fear:
I won’t sell your spirit to the thief of everything
in his pin-striped outfit of sloth, lust, and envy,
no, instead, why don’t you wear my sheer wings
for seven months and I’ll meet you back here,
where greed weds ambition in unholy matrimony,
and then tell me chasing pleasure-demons you desire
is worth the devil’s nightmare you call immortality.

David Spicer has published poems in The Santa Clara Review, Synaeresis, Chiron Review, Remington Review, unbroken, Raw, Third Wednesday, The Bookends Review, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Gargoyle, and elsewhere. Nominated for a Best of the Net three times and a Pushcart once, he is author of one full-length poetry collection, Everybody Has a Story (St. Luke's Press). His latest chapbook is From the Limbs of a Pear Tree, (Flutter Press). He lives in Memphis.