XII: Poetry by David Spicer & Assemblage by Greg Hanson, 2
Sammy and his Bile
I can’t joke about Fascist Sammy,
a friend in Idaho who abused his wife
and was a Klan member. He hated
the Vatican, loved spaghetti western heroes
like “The Man With No Name.” In his
cellblock, Sammy belonged to the Aryan
Brotherhood, thought he was in paradise,
and didn’t sway from the grassy
knoll theory. Since birth, bile gnawed
at Sammy’s craw and he preached
nihilism as if it were a duty. One day
he forced a parking attendant to strip
in his truck, raped her after reading
the girl’s diary, but fell asleep
and she jogged away, called the cops
while he remained. When he attempted
to escape, a detective head-clipped him
with a flashlight. He denied the crime,
begged for mercy after presenting a teacher
as a character witness. He entered the penal
empire for twenty years, shaved his head.
Flickering away time, Sammy entered
deposits into his canteen fund from a drug
trade. He dreamed of Venice and buying
a gondola to show tourists pastel buildings
of the canal, and then one rainy day
another con rammed a shiv in his liver.
David Spicer has, in pursuit of the word, worked as paper boy, dishwasher, bottle loader, record warehouser, carpet roll dragger, burger flopper, ditch digger, weather observer, furniture mover, temporary flunky, gas pumper, bookseller, tutor, 11th and 12th grader babysitter, magazine and book editor and publisher, typesetter, medical journal proofreader, and librarian’s assistant. The author of one full-length collection of poems and four chapbooks, plus eight unpublished manuscripts, he has published in slicks, non-slicks, and online journals such as American Poetry Review, Curly Mind, Jersey Devil Press, Ploughshares, Reed Magazine, The Slim Volume, Yellow Chair Review, and others.
Greg Hanson hails from Portland, OR, and is a 2012 recipient of a GLEAN grant. Founded in 2011, GLEAN provides local artists from the Portland area with a stipend and six months of access to the Metro Central Transfer Station (a.k.a. “the dump”) to glean materials for (re)use in art projects. A group exhibit to conclude artist residencies is also provided to grant recipients. You can view all of Greg’s finished creations from his 2012 GLEAN residency at Greg’s Mixed Media Gallery, and also read about his experiences during the grant period at his Blog-o-Matic.
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