Brett Griffiths

Sonder

Orb-weaver, young, perhaps sac spider.
Silver body, translucent legs—or nearly so—
against the water. Small suds
rising. I lift its small body
from the bathwater. My home
is hospitable to small things and accidents,
so many cracks, room enough
for drafts and heartbeats
that measure days or hours.
I sweep the tub before I touch the faucet,
tread carefully the concrete of the basement,
where house centipedes sublet
an entire universe of their own.
But this spider,
white as the tub. I missed it.
On the socials, an old lover
wrote a wish to forget
me completely. Yes.
I want that for him,
to be lifted from his memory
as softly as the two-part body
of this spider from spume.
Today, the mind steps out
to witness drowned memory.
We are old now. Too old—
almost—for restitution. Or resurrection
beyond the numb face of blunders.
This spider. Was I his apocalypse?
Or a brief and sudden rain
that then wasn’t? I would unharm him
if I could. Every betrayal.
And none. A prayer. The corpse
of this spider on the floor beside the tub.
In the night another of his kind
might find him, devour his small body,
washed in oil, salt. An offering, his life
will dissolve into nothing,
smaller than death rattle,
the pinch of a spider’s jaw.

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Brett Griffiths earned her MFA a lifetime ago and went off on side quests to save the world and failed. Poetry has served as rear gun and pilot mechanic during two decades of quantum upheaval and discontent. Griffiths has published her work in Wicked Alice, PoetryMemoirStory and The Ohio State’s The Journal. She currently serves as editor for The MacGuffin literary magazine. She is the mother to two children and two dogs, wife to a scientist, and foraging landlord to a flush of mushrooms. Her academic work has been published in various journals, and she is the editorial co-author of Two-Year College Writing Studies: Rationales and Praxis for Just Teaching from Utah State University Press, released in September 2023. She is working on a collection of poetry and a book-length creative essay, grief and the Midwest Gothic, circa 1979. When she is not writing or teaching, Griff travels, forages, kayaks, knits and bakes with (and without) her family of four. Most days, she talks to ghosts. On good days, they talk back.