
A Kind of Spring
The best time to fall in love
is when you share your greatest fear
with someone who isn’t listening.
There’s a decent chance that
will become your newest
greatest fear. There’s no point
in letting it shift to anger; who
do you think will listen to that?
Close your eyes and run as fast
as you can into oncoming traffic.
Whoever stops to save you, marry
them. If no one stops—let’s be honest,
no one will—at least you’ve
made good time home. When someone
talks about the weather on an
elevator, don’t believe them until
they offer a ring. There are spies
everywhere. When your heart stops,
it probably means you’re dead. Don’t
worry. All winter, your joints
have ached with chill. When summer
comes, you open your windows to
sneeze at the world. There’s war
outside, but no one calls it that. If they
do, consider baking something for
them. The brown haired men with
accents all call you sir, and the women
snap at their children to make way
when you pass. Smile. Say something
soothing. Step into the mud. If you can
think of a way to feel better about all
this, of a way to stop the meanness
of the heart, please let me know.
Honeysuckle Vine
A honeysuckle vine grew down
the ditch wall, choking the bracken
in the corner below the road. We’d
clamber up the debris and washoff
to pick the flowers, taste the drop
of sweet, more taunt than meal,
then slide our muddy jeans down
to the bottom. Sucking steps took
us over to the road, to play in the pipe
that ran under. If you were tall
enough, you could walk it, hands on
one wall, feet on the other. They
told us it was dangerous, what if
it collapsed under the weight
of traffic? When they tried to send
us home or to school over the bridge,
we said but you said it’s too
dangerous, what if the road collapses?
Writing Spider
It was black with yellow stripes,
or maybe the other way around,
in a big web by the overgrown
back door we were scared of.
The legend was that if you spelled
out a word in stones nearby, it
would copy it into its web. Hence
the story about the needy pig,
though I always preferred the rat.
We started with Fuck. When
that didn’t take, Shit. Maybe
this was a puritanical spider,
so we tried Butt. Inside, the living
room was quiet because Mom
was dying in her bed. The light
faded until Dad dragged in,
slurring his steps and bitching
about the lack of dinner. After
we peeled potatoes and put them
on to fry, I snuck out in the cool
of the porchlight and spelled Help.

CL Bledsoe is the author of twenty books, most recently the poetry collection
Trashcans in Love,
the short story collection The Shower Fixture Played the Blues, and the novel The Funny Thing About… He lives in Northern Virginia with his daughter and blogs, with Michael Gushue, at https://medium.com/@howtoeven