Tyler Bigney

 

Spiders

The spiders living,
making babies on your ceiling
are helpless
to my force and
Kerouac’s Desolation Angels,
(the only Kerouac I didn’t care for)
as you lay on the bed
crying,
sobbing
that you missed your period.

Watching my grandmother smoke out of a window

Somewhere in Russia,
on a train traveling east,
my grandmother pries open
a window
with her wrinkled hands,
and asks me to be
the look out.

“What am I looking out for?”

“People,” she says,
lighting a cigarette.

I watch as the skin on her cheeks
sinks in,
holding the smoke
as she closes her eyes.

I watch as she stretches
to tiptoes
breathing out
flicks the burning
cigarette
out the window
sinks back into her seat
and smiles
as if the world outside
does not exist.


CP

Tyler Bigney lives in Nova Scotia. His short stories, poems, and prose have appeared in Poetry New Zealand, Nerve Cowboy, Iodine Poetry Journal, Underground Voices, among others.