Zombie Spiders

  —Cellar spider (Phalcus phalangioides) infected by Cordyceps fungus

Wilma tells me her nephew has fuzzy white spiders

in the crawl space beneath his house.

He calls them zombie spiders, which combines

two of my greatest fears. It’s irrational,

I know, but I think it’s the bite that terrifies me,

makes my heart all jittery and jumpy.

My great grandmother’s house in the country

had a cellar, pungent clay earth floor, corners

and angles held fast with webs. What those creatures

survived upon, I couldn’t say, unless it was dark,

dank air. I never knew there was a fungus

that could take over their bodies, leave them

half alive. Some days,

sadness grows in tendrils across my body,

forces me to slump and shuffle, makes me

handle knives and swallow pills. Last night,

I watched a movie about a doctor desperate

to save his wife, find a cure for her mortality.

He discovered a chemical compound that changed

all the functions of the body, made her a monster

in her own skin. Wilma tells me grief is a parasite

that roots through every thought, finds sustenance

in the heart. Sometimes, it crawls under the house

clinging to this world in disbelief.

Dave Prather been publishing off and on for several years. His first collection of poems, We Were Birds, appeared in late fall of 2019 (just months before the world shut down). He studied writing with Steve Orlen, Agha Shahid Ali, Tony Hoagland, and Joan Aleshire at Warren Wilson College, and studied acting at the National Shakespeare Conservatory in New York.