Oh, for Arachne’s sake, here she comes again
dark candyfloss cloud haloing her head;
Satan’s angel come to undo me.
I crouch within my octagonal palace, Sisyphean.
My nest carefully constructed yesterday, and redone
the day before — and many a day before that.
Her finger prods my thread and
as if to spite me: pesty mite, she tears
apart the spun fruit gossamer of my labours.
With one touch
the whole of it
collapses.
Oh, my aching spinneret, silk-worm organ of life!
Again, we must construct anew.
Thus, in cloistered night, I emerge to weave and tease
a home from the shredded pulp of her hand’s undoing.
I huddle into its depths, my dusk blanket
curing in mercurial moonlight. By morning it hosts
my parcelled meals among the glistening dew.
The sun rises a threat; the dread
of human destruction oozes through me.
The devil is nigh.
I leap, I crouch. I challenge and beg her
with silence seeping from all eight of my eyes.
“You have the whole world,” she observes, dark
finger hesitating at the edge of my diurnal masterpiece.
“Why must you build your web on my fucking car?”
Maddison O’Donnell splits her time between the US, the UK, and Ireland. When she isn’t battling intense bouts of jetlag or attempting to befriend her sleep paralysis demon, she spends her time writing novels and trying to communicate with the magpie that loiters outside her window.