Susanna Childress

FOR PAPA LAMAR, ON THE VERGE OF DEATH

Ten minutes after I find out you are in a coma

my best friend in the entire state of Florida spots

a black widow spider and we squat in the heat,

scared and awestruck at once, its red hourglass belly up,

suspended by eight legs like crooked bobby pins,

and she says, Well we can’t just leave it here.

Oh yes we can, I think, but instead I say,

What should we do? since she’s the kind of woman

who will know and since I am still baffled that,

after your doctors predicted by the angiogram

you’d be good for years, a kidney infection somehow

sent you straight on your way to buying the farm.

My friend heads across the street into a store where

some nitwit hands her a bookmark to squash the spider

and she says, Lady, it’s a Black Widow, which

lands her one of those question-marky smiles

and when she comes out shaking her head we both know

it’s no good, neither of us covered by HMO or given to jolts

of bravery, we’ll have to let the spider be, right here

in the middle of everything, snapdragons,

border collies, all these oblivious people who might

stretch out an ankle or set their toes on this gatepost

and locate, painfully, two tiny pricks for which they’ll cuss

and stamp and find themselves, in an hour or two,

full of pus and hot blood. It’s bright as heaven out here

and we’re starting to sweat seriously, weighing

all this, when my best friend in the entire state of Florida

takes the apple out of my hand and brings it down, just
like that,

on the black widow spider, spurting it open. It was something to
see,

Papa, our chests heaving and our eyes stuck on that apple,

which I did not eat for lunch, which we left right there

in the park, wedged in the bars of the gate, covered

with broke-free pieces of web, and I thought maybe

you’d like to know of it, hovering as you are, between

here and there, how what needs to happen will happen,

even if it surprises the breath right out of you.