Mantis Madrigal

Lisa Russ Spaar Click to read more...

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of Satin Cash; Poems, Blue Venus: Poems, and Glass Town: Poems, for which she recieved a Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers in 2000. She is editor of Acquainted With the Night: Insomnia Poems (Columbua UP, 1999) and All That Might Heart: London Poems (University of Virginia Press, 2008). A collection of her essays about contemporary poetry was published by Drunken Boat Editions in 2013. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2009/2010 and serves as poetry editor for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Earth’s heir, pre-historic prophet
in prayerful ambush position
on the sea side of this beach-house door,
intricate erector-set contraption

of twigs camouflaged to match
salt-bitten boards, you swivel
your skeptical, bicycle-seat head
my way, a cosmos horoscopal

in eyes bulbous as convex mirrors.
I see myself, prey to the cri de coeur
of visitations.  But you’re no augur;
I’m on my way to the outdoor shower.

I know in sex you’ll eat your mate.  In hunger,
your self, as at my hackled back, you always stir.

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