house of spiders

you told me to kill her
& for a few moments we stared
at the palm-sized spider 
in the bottom of the bath.
it is a burnt sugar september.
i think maybe this is the month of spiders.
with a shampoo bottle
i did what you asked. in her death
she became a folding chair. i use
a potato peeler on the sun.
save some shavings for the coming dark.
i do not mind getting older. what i mind
is the world getting older too. 
the spiders do not go away. 
she is only the beginning. 
a spider on my foot in the morning
& a spider walking the shower curtain 
the next afternoon. a spider carrying
a story about gold & another spider
with the truth about how we will 
become ghosts. i find the infants too.
spiders the size of blinks. 
i do not want to kill anymore.
whenever i can, i let them go.
they knit halos in the corners of every room. 
sometimes i get nostalgia videos
on my tiktok. i cannot look at them
for too long or else i'll start panicking.
running as if time is a stop motion
little machine that i can trick into
letting me return. the spiders 
are not like us. they talk all the time.
they talk past & present & 
elsewhere. in their webs, time becomes
a string of christmas lights. 
i tell the spiders i am sorry for killing
one of their own. they do not accept
the apology. they say,
"she is not dead." a thousand of her
live in the walls. her face,
an anagram. back & forward.
they also tell me, "summer is not over."
"but it is almost," i say, desperate
for them to understand why i feel
like i'm dying. "summer is always over,"
they tell me as if it were a comfort. 
i dig a hole beneath the cedar
to bury the first spider i killed. 
i do not have her body so instead
i bury my left thumb. maybe it is
a comfort. maybe it is.