The Problem with Love
by John Wall Barger
My brother died & I got his tarantula.
Ma asked if I was fucking man enough
& I said “Yeah” so she handed me a book,
Tarantulas, Their Captive Husbandry
& Reproduction, & went back to her TV shows.
It was a girl spider. She lived in a fish tank
with plastic ferns & a tiny house
just big enough to hide in.
She let me hold her & she never bit.
She spun a silk forest to decorate her house.
I fed her bugs & told her tales
I made up about Pa. I came in the room
& she rattled her little pedipalp hands,
which they do when mating,
hoping I’d pick her up. One day
she fell off my arm onto the floor
& just lay there a second
before creeping toward her fish tank,
& one of her legs fell off.
I placed her in, gently.
She crawled, wonky, into her house.
I had a bad dream that night.
I woke in the dark, found Ma’s hair scissors,
reached into the spider’s house
& cut off a leg. She hissed at me
& hid. Next morning she wobbled
out to greet me, & I cut off another leg.
Each day I cut another leg.
She stopped spinning a silk forest.
Her legs grew back
& I just cut them off again.
Soon she wouldn’t come out
of her house, or eat her crickets.
She tossed sharp hairs at me,
teeny spears. Then her legs
did not grow back. She sat in her house,
gray, hissing like a punctured
basketball. One morning
I scooped her into my palm,
chatting like the old days
& she just sat there, not biting.
In the backyard I lowered her
onto an anthill. As the red ants
climbed her, swarmed & lynched her,
I hosed down the fish tank.
It took ten minutes to scrub it spotless,
so the sun really shone through the glass.
John Wall Barger was born in New York City, but grew up in Canada. He currently lives in a village house in Hong Kong, and teaches Creative Writing at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has published two books of poetry with Palimpsest Press: Pain-proof Men (2009) and Hummingbird (2012). Hummingbird was a finalist for the 2013 Raymond Souster Award.