The Spider in the Kitchen

By | 1 February 2014

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.

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