Today's poem is by John A. Nieves

Spin-the-Globe Charades
       

Spin One

I am acting like a wall with one portico
adorned by a cockatrice and subtle
lichens. She swings and I crumble. Then

she stands over me. I act like a man;
she acts like the state. Her knee sinks into
my throat. I pretend she is choking me, or

I am choking, or I see something startling
in the sky. She cocks her head back,
mouths the song of sirens.

Spin Two

I am doing a rather obvious tree; she, too,
is creating a simple impression: thick fog
rolling over low hills. I'm part of an orchard.

She fills me, and then rifle reports and marching
and clanking. At my base, I hold my toes
just right to represent a memorial plaque, to imply

what happened here has sunk deep, has rolled itself
up in the rocky soil. And she is moss, so green
and dense and always facing north.

Spin Three

With the score tied, and the other couple on
the couch, she arches into a rainbow over
my creeping vines. I send tendrils into skulls,

and statues of skulls. In a second she'll be thin
rain beading in the same hollow eye my bloom
presses through. My hand, down below, resembles

a group of sitting men, pulsing, chanting, clucking.
Her hands become their hands and the shadows
of their hands. My eyes, the ritual, the bees.

The Final Spin

Now we are winning. She is a red brick house
braced tight against the prairie that was
my back. I breathe hard and the wind shrieks

through the tall grass. Then I am someone digging
and she is someone dragging another someone
toward the new ditch. The dead one's eyes bulge

red and its lips seem more cracked than possible.
The skin is all rise and fall, pock and peak. I am now
the ditch and I welcome the dead. I have so much room.

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Copyright © 2023 John A. Nieves All rights reserved
from Beloit Poetry Journal
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission