Jeremy Spears

COSMIC TURTLE

Listen to Audio Version read by Sean Mahoney.

At a friend's party, I called you my red hot date and told our hostess
I was expecting to get lucky afterward. Keep it up, you said,
making a screwy face, and I'm going to beat you with my cane.

Ooo la la, Brenda. Bippity boppity boo.
We weren't always laughing but we mostly were. You had turned up hours
early that day (as you always did) and found me planting hibiscus bushes
in my backyard. I was shirtless and covered in mud. I reminded you how you enjoyed me best when I was at my filthiest.

The sun started to dwindle as you kept me company that afternoon, regaling me
with stories of your family's hijinks: the deadhead brother and the divorce, your mother
the high roller who'd landed in Vegas, your worshiped father who went too soon

and always the child psychiatrist recovering from a transplant who you used to say
lived alone in a big house with little dogs. You'd just recently brought him out
of the closet you created. We'd tormented each other about him for years.

He sounds like one of mine, I said. I think I want to meet him. You printed out
a blown up picture of him in a poppy field, stuck it on my wall and told everybody
I was in love with him. I refused to discredit you. After your death, he showed up

transparently having heard the story too. In your apartment, sifting through remnants,
he lay down on your sofa and bitterly wept, just like a crocodile
pretending to be a log. Yes I put my arms around him and yes…

If Brenda could see us now, he said.
She'd be breaking out her cane, I answered.

When I remember you, I remember those first days when you were new,
intrepidly traversing that parking lot with your cane, slower than the rest of us.
I hung back, talking to you, walking in circles so as not to outdistance.

Cosmic turtle wreathed by flit of galactic butterfly.
Something eternal moved beneath us while it seemed we stayed
static, on point, making no progress at all.

The poems of Jeremy Spears have appeared in such publications as the Green Mountains Review, the Illinois Review, Flyway and the James White Review. He is a recipient of the David Lindahl Prize from the JWR. Currently he is an Operations Manager for a Medicaid/Medicare Health Plan in Phoenix, Arizona.