Watching My Father Crush a Black Widow
on My Last Day in California
when the laborer
fell through on finishing
the job, my father
left the trunk
to dry on the front
lawn, eighty pounds
of amputated wood
to hack away at
slowly – when I
see him walk
outside, machete
in one hand &
log in the other
I follow, sensing
there will be violence –
maybe a dismembered
finger, or wood
chip to the eye –
he orders me to
heap sticks &
leaves in the yard
waste receptacle
where I discover
the black widow
upside down,
a red hourglass
marking
her abdomen,
the insect we were
all conditioned
to fear, as children,
a mature specimen
in webbed suspension
is hard to ignore
but I do, piling
wood around her
habitat; my father
tells me to kill it
with a stick &
when I keep stacking
saying silent mantras
to will the widow away,
he breaks a bough &
stabs until he’s pinned her
to the plastic wall
I watched how
she never fought
back & then I
covered her body
beneath a mountain
of dead branches;
around us, life
grows wild – algae
blooms in the swimming pool
weeds sprout
through concrete,
mold colonizes a roof
dried lilies in the sunburnt
koi pond, gophers tearing
up the lawn that
my father cuts back
with the rusted mower
blades dulled by
sticks & wood
he intends to bury
beneath the ground
once all life has
drained away
beyond any
possibility of
regeneration –
I think of
the stump that
is my older brother,
the mother that
escaped w/ her life,
the girl that grew up
dreading spiders
learning that
either we kill
or be killed
