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.
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