Flare
Truth is at its sharpest at three a.m., when muscle and bone discuss divorce in wet weather. I slip a book from under my pillow. My room is rural dark, back field dark, so dark I can read by the wan glow cast from the kitchen light through the crack under my bedroom door, the same dim radiance as this unhurried burn of inflammation. I convince myself that the view of sun breaking over water is what I need, to soothe this body whose pieces were cut with different blades, painted the same color, and built back together so what feels like dying is just life, and life, and life again.
The Myth is Wrong
The male black widow is much smaller than the female. He spins a small web, deposits sperm, rubs it into his extra forward appendages, the pedipalps, and places himself between her fangs to mate. Imagine such submission, approaching some fearsome, wicked-toothed beauty, the utter end of you towering above as you tap, tap, tap, seeking the right opening to deposit your worship. Do spiders know fear? Does it matter? The myth is wrong: the male is rarely eaten in the wild. Only captive widows kill and eat their mates. Set me free.
Colleen S. Harris earned her MFA in Writing from Spalding University and works as a university library dean. Author of four full-length poetry collections and four chapbooks, her most recent work includes The Light Becomes Us (Main Street Rag, 2025), Toothache in the Bone (boats against the current, 2025), The Girl and the Gifts (Bottlecap, 2025), and These Terrible Sacraments (Doubleback, 2019; Bellowing Ark, 2010). Her poetry appears in Berkeley Poetry Review, The Louisville Review, The MacGuffin, and more than eighty others. She goes by warmaiden on Bluesky, and you can find more of her work at colleensharris.com.