In the Black Widow’s Web
Meisha Rosenberg
After the divorce, my mother took me often
to the Boston Museum of Science
in search of culture that my father, set
on the plains of Canada where she’d left him,
could not provide. Knowing her lair,
I’d zoom to the basement to find the black widow; or rather,
two of them: The papier-mâche rendition three feet in size,
strung upside-down from the ceiling,
bulbous abdomen shining near her spitball egg sac,
and her twin, a specimen in a display case. “Most venomous spider
in North America,” the display swore,
the male Lactrodectus consort an afterthought—
not dispatched as often as rumor had it,
but vulnerable when captured in a lab cage. “There’s no reason
for you to fear her, no black widows in Boston,”
my mother determined in sharp reason.
She said we could have made this widow
ourselves, in the kitchen with flour-glue,
as many other times we’d crafted masks for fun.
She’d be borne in on the same cold wind
Salem witches rode, pierced balloon inside.
I studied her maquette of newspaper shell, wiry legs,
pikes of cast iron, unerring as New England’s rusting muskets.
Then, steeling myself, I walked over and pushed
the red button on the glass case lighting up
the real arachnid, dead, telltale red hourglass
on her belly, tiny bride pinned
to her sterile cushion.
Look how a mother makes her traps
from softest silk—the black widow
exhumed for me, at age four,
the poisoned marriage, victims envenomed
against their own neurons. She bound me—
her art, her daughter—
with sticky threads to that sculpture,
then to the feared bulb—death’s
seed—knitted to every thought.
