by Elizabeth Jacobson

A black widow tends two webs in different corners of my bathroom.

She crawls back and forth on the white plaster wall between her traps, 

eats from the abdomen of a millipede first, 

head of a pill bug next. 

A male widow doesn't spin a web. 

He destroys a female’s snare so other males are not attracted to her, 

and sacrifices himself after an involved courtship 

in which he gently binds her legs with his silk. 

After my bath, water dripping on the floor, 

the widow crawls from a nook, rests her carapace over a droplet. 

Black widows don’t need to drink water; 

they get ample fluids from their prey. 

With the flashlight on my phone beamed at her head 

I see her palps moving, flicking droplets onto her body, 

shaking them off.

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Elizabeth Jacobson was the fifth Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico and an Academy of American Poets 2020 Laureate Fellow. Her most recent book, Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air, won the New Measure Poetry Prize, selected by Marianne Boruch (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2019), and the 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for both New Mexico Poetry and Best New Mexico Book. She is the Reviews Editor for Terrain.org.

by Elizabeth Jacobson

Although everything always has everything to do with sex,

each time, this one thing

has more to do with the sway of tree shadows

contained in rectangle boxes of light—

reflections of the windows, yielding from the windows,

caught in a breeze on the white plaster walls of the room,

and although it is often true the male of a species

has the more colorful markings, here I am the brightest one

against the white sheets

back arching,

a rising whale throwing its form from the sea

turning rose, then scarlet, then peony—light spreading across our flesh

and the marvelous ability to be held by instinct.

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Elizabeth Jacobson’s second book,Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air, won the New Measure Poetry Prize, selected by Marianne Boruch (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2019). She is the founding director of the WingSpan Poetry Project, a not-for-profit which conducts weekly poetry classes in battered family and homeless shelters in New Mexico. Wingspan has received 4 grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Orion Magazine, Ploughshares, Plume, and others. Elizabeth is the Reviews Editor for Terrain.org and the Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico.