THE SPIDER

It all started when I tried to drown
the spider. Or moments before, when I hear
Nana’s simmered paranoia gurgling that welfare
Lady wants to kill me, how the very walls
were out to get her, the shrill accretion of lost
addresses becoming one long voice of haunt.

It had startled me, the spider, haunting
in the bottom of the wastebasket like a drowned
violet orchid, hinged legs that skimmed the lost
angularity of plastic as circle, never up. We’ve heard
we’re all this side of killers. No history of walls
seals the cry, Don’t touch that knife, you want the welfare

worker to kick us out? For my own welfare
no implement of defense is within reach, since I’d haunt
this side of Nutsville, emboss the splintered plaster walls
with the last name no one can pronounce. Time to drown
this bug now, thrust the bin into the rusted tub. I heard
the creak and knock of the opened faucet, then sat, lost

in my first language, to watch the hairy spot swirl like a lost
wind-scarred crumb evading the pigeon, like we fled welfare
hawks who know coatless children shrieking cold are heard
above the din of those with houses. Tin-scented water haunted
the one-bulb room where the villain would just not drown.
One leg stabbed the surface, flailed the air for a wall

up which to claw, some perch to breach the porcelain wall
it could not scale. I yearned to strangle the monster but lost
the courage in my cleaner’s hands. Why won’t this nightmare drown?
Where are mothers inoculated against the venom of welfare
spies? They shoot the ugly ones first, Nana’s plea for make-up haunted.
The torment grew purple and plumper. Roiled expletives heard,

untranslated, as ricochets from upstairs tenants. No other spider heard
its comrade’s battle of seize, fold, and sink through the bathroom wall.
When will the last bubbles rise, the last crimped leg wither? It will haunt
this apartment block in the blind alley where the fatherless, lost,
hoard and hustle to stay. Why not just evict this pest for its own welfare?

But it would not drown. The crack of my boot pierced the walls
but no wail was heard; only the calm of my welfare
restored to a lost afternoon where the unrecovered haunt.