Arachnophobia
by Allen Wilson
In the poet-outlaw’s room
Fear and his muse stand watch by turns
As night approaches
That will know no dawn
Anna Akhmatova
CRAAAAAAACCK!!!
Mandelshtam explodes
from his dream—goddamned
pretenders pains in ass
no better than sonofabitch
Soviets always with the
interruptions not giving dead
even peace of dreams—Osip
Emilyevich stirs the murky gloom
grasping for fragments
of his shattered dream
4:00 am and I’m searching
the bathroom floor for
the remains of the spider
I just smashed with the
Voronezh Notebooks
Poets and spiders
two of the most
accident-prone species
on earth whether
hiding or on the run
not knowing from
where the next
shot will come—
only that it will
Spiders perhaps
luckier get swept up
with dust and
poured back into
mix; poets on other
hand eternal torture
no sooner begins
his dream gets crushed
under gleaming boots
jealous of the night