David Spicer
One of Those Evenings
when my father scratched his crotch, my sister and I
thought it funny as a basket of frowning bananas.
He gazed at us, a gleam in his eyes, and said, Time
for a movie, kids. Running toward the hatchback Nash,
we waited in the front seat before my father drove
to the Palace and dropped us at the ticket counter to watch
Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison. Old enough to guess
what our parents did as we ate popcorn and sipped
lemonades in the dark, we laughed at the wrong lines
when Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr wandered
on the island, trading glances, telling their life stories.
My sister and I'll always remember that movie:
we loved their fantasy romance in a softer way
than the Fuck me more! of our parents' child-free nights.
Bio
David Spicer has published poems in Santa Clara Review, Reed Magazine, Synaeresis, Hamilton Stone Review, Alcatraz, Yellow Mama,The Reed Magazine, CircleShow, Chiron Review, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of Everybody Has a Story and six chapbooks, the latest of which is Tribe of Two (Seven CirclePress). A new collection of poems, Waiting for the Needle Rain (Hekate Publishing) is now available. His website is www.davidspicer76.com.