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Five Poems
by Jon Woodward


it was a spider dangling
from my mail slot I
caught him in a drinking
glass Daring Jumping Spider Phidippus
audax I made him a

home in an empty salsa
jar he wasn’t eating his
crickets I let him go
all of this strictly during
daylight hours it’s good history

to claim it only happened
once but how then this
itching vestige looking closely enough
to see his retinas flash
who failed to free whom

this is the second shower
I’ve taken today I didn’t
need to take this one
all I did today was
wake up and watch TV

at one point I walked
to the grocery store and
bought a pound of strawberries
for 99 cents they weren’t
too tart if my body

is found I want them
to pack it with strawberries
I want my casket lined
with strawberries I want them
to bulldoze strawberries over me




I had no business blowing
mushroom clouds in the campfire
with 100 proof vodka I
could’ve killed myself it made
the girls there go oooooh

that always feels nice nobody
wants to start an argument
I could jump in front
of a car and I’d
probably survive they’d honk they’d

do anything to keep me
out of their car and
who’d blame them contrarily who
could fear death no more
spiked memories no foolish confrontations

just pure profit




the eye a plastic bubble
filled with milk more than
twenty miles of visibility trapped
therein and it’s a fine
day to jump out of

an airplane the doors open
and the suits full of
men leap from the gray
belly run and leap out
into and through fields of

temporary black flak marigolds blooming
and dissipating into air you’re
always falling even inside the
plane into wide awakeness the
lights the wide aperture into




are we to understand that
the first man in front
of the bull and the
second man behind the bull
and the third in mid

leap are all the same
man that what is being
depicted is the leap itself
my eye at least agrees
with this triune depiction yesterday

today tomorrow which contains the
leap required to believe the
original leg leap yes can
get you up over the
charge of the outstretched bull