Spider Woman
I imagine there is one person in the Midwest
for whom everything is true.
She would exist as a lightning rod
for the weird, so the rest of us could sleep at night.
There really was a hook embedded
in her car door on prom night. She woke up
in a bathtub packed in ice
with one of her kidneys gone.
Then when we think she is finally dead,
before we bury her alive,
a scalpel will be drawn across her abdomen,
and spiders will break forth like a Halloween piñata—
eight for each year while she slept.
We will pull out our calipers and measure her age
like in dog years, like with the rings of a tree.
I imagine there is one person in the Midwest
for whom everything is true.
She would exist as a lightning rod
for the weird, so the rest of us could sleep at night.
There really was a hook embedded
in her car door on prom night. She woke up
in a bathtub packed in ice
with one of her kidneys gone.
Then when we think she is finally dead,
before we bury her alive,
a scalpel will be drawn across her abdomen,
and spiders will break forth like a Halloween piñata—
eight for each year while she slept.
We will pull out our calipers and measure her age
like in dog years, like with the rings of a tree.
The secret of poetry is cruelty.--Jon Anderson