I fed the spider beef.

Summer flies

in town were oddly few.

The spider took it in her stride,
tackled the bloody meat

with her black legs and due

surprise. She liked it.

Mince, matchhead size, soon
burned in her abdomen. She thrived

and bred, though I never saw

her dark stranger call. The babies

were little monsters, big
and hungry. I obliged. Fillet steak.

No-one else now entered

the lovely kitchen until,

one day, a wise guy
– distant relative in his teens –

who’d got wind of my arachnids,

looked down on me and from

his core, swore in a baritone
it was the hormones in the meat.

His bent head proved the ceiling now

too low. The spiders stretched

themselves across wide windows.
I looked heartlessly into their eyes.


This poem appears in Andrew Sant’s collection, Fuel, published by Black Pepper Publishing.