Yellow-haired Girl with Spider
John Rybicki

Once a spider lived under her arm and
so she never shaved. She let her armpit
hair grow gnarl for that spider to nest in.
She'd slipper step the wet grass night
with her wet grass feet and hold a bare
light bulb up under her hairy arm
with the hairy spider living inside it.
She'd keep that one arm raised until
fat moths and June bugs and beetles
and loads of mosquitoes tangled in her
armpit, trembling and pinned down,
exhausting themselves until the spider
slipped from the warm cave top of the
armpit to sting those moths and beetle
bugs and June bugs and mosquitoes,
sting them over and over with that
one kiss I could not live without.

© John Rybicki

John Rybicki's main gig, his missionary work, is teaching creative writing to inner-city children in Detroit. He tours the land teaching students at various colleges and schools about the holiness of a sentence. Every day he falls in love with stuff like the slightest trembling of a leaf. His wife is his sun and moon and more. And when he isn't teaching, or hammering away at the page, he likes to roll around in the dirt doing carpentry.

His poems and stories have appeared in the North American Review, Bomb, Field, Ohio Review, The Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly, as well as in numerous anthologies. His first book of poems, Traveling at High Speeds, is out on New Issues Poetry Press. And he has a chapbook, Yellow-Haired Girl with Spider, forthcoming on March Street Press. His second book of poems is Fire Psalm.

© New Issues

© March Street