Madam Black Widow (poem)

Madam Black Widow

I have three things to do

Just in the course of a brief review

I can smell their error

They forget they’ve left the trash bags here

They forget that I can spray the door

(I have an enemy who lives out there)

They forget that I can scratch the car

They have garaged me, Madam Black Widow

Well! I was entrapped

Why would I not…no! I don’t go so far as to say steal…

I disagree with their tactics. They would name an act, rig charges up

Bandy words like dangling string and pounce

At my distraction

But, certainly, she left it open…

On the counter

And even the greasy sandwich bag had nuance

The dog eats paper

Now, for myself, spider—

(The company, Mr. Boots says privately, a

friendless exile must keep)

I would not put catsup on chicken

(the name must be a great misapprehension)

It took some doing, to drag the bread away and get the bacon

The sauce, you see, had got the bread stuck tight

And there was—appreciate, if you will, the enormity of human taste—

A tomato…a leaf of some sort

All this before the consummation

Madam Black Widow, do you know bacon?

“I’m not a fly, to feed on garbage,” Madam Spider sniffs.  She shrugs. (She does this with her second pair of legs) “I will eat a fly. I won’t say I prefer one raised on refuse. The best I’ve had was fed on mouse, in its tender maggot days.” She sighs, recollecting this. “I keep to my own house. But cat, if they find me in theirs they will kill me. I am poison. Yes, I was born that way…and they

Are made in the image of their god.”

Madam Black Widow

Haunt of Thieves: part  seven

That You Love

(2014, Stephanie Foster)