You were a good tarantula,
wide as the hand that types this line,
eight legs long as the line itself,
little caesuras jointing segment to segment.
Mom kept you in the divorce.
Had you been male, you’d have died
before the marriage did, the husbands
of your species snuffing out like sitcoms
while the wives drag on for decades
like senators. We fed you crickets
fat from Pet City, miller moths trapped
under our Tupperware and burped
into your silky den. You pounced, supped,
collected their brittle exteriors.
When we forgot to cinch the rubber band
around your little globe’s screen ceiling,
you showed me what to do when I escaped:
épater les bourgeois—my stepfather,
paralyzed upon the asterisk of you
inside the dining room’s Still-Life with Pears,
inching toward the frame.
You led me to find a footing
in art, to need little, to want more.
Now I, too, am childless, one of the gals;
and if someone dangles a pencil
in front of my eight eyes,
I’ll rear up on my hind legs and bare
the fangs no man would dare remove.