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Moving North
The Brown Recluse, also known as the Hermit Fiddler,
a spider whose bite produces a gangrenous sore, is
apparently spreading northward. From its original
home in the Southwest it has now migrated as far as
North Carolina.
Not it. She. The one with eggs.
Demographer with the future in her belly,
moving up in the world. Texas rots
dry, Louisiana wet. Twenty
years in Alabama: closets, drawers,
silver chests, the backs of portraits
cottoned with eggs and everywhere the sweet
festering scent. In Tennessee
she homed into the woodpile, roughed it,
budded the boards with eggs. Now here
holed up in my ornamental block
she babysits a quiet contagion.
Lady,
I know your bite. I am myself
something of a recluse and given
to wearing brown. My Odyssey—
no, my Penelopeid up the dry
shins of girlhood to the wetter parts
was not unlike your own. We are heading
both of us north. The cold, I hear,
is shriveling, the cold bites back.
Even in this lush midway state I feel
a touch of gangrene on my hither leg,
some deadlier hermit fiddling in my brain.
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