The jar still stands, now by an anthill
where tri-part bodies labor, the way busy people
pass the faces of skyscrapers, so it towers,
and sometimes gleams and sometimes doesn’t,
splattered where raindrops daubed sand.
Inside, a rusted bolt, a note in a childish hand
and a dead spider curled to dust—something
a boy left behind when late, his mother called,
and years and continents away, he is a man
and wakes suddenly at night, the way we do,
with awareness that even spiders breathe and mate,
and thinking of its scrabble and its dying,
and all the larger harms that he has done and
doesn’t know and can’t, just now, remember.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 19, Issue 3.
D M Gordon is the author of Fourth World and Nightly, at the Institute of the Possible, a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award and International Book Award. Phi Beta Kappa, Masters in Music from Boston University, she’s a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellow in fiction, and finalist in poetry. She is an editor for Hedgerow Books and at www.dmgordoneditorial.com.
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