After the folded newspaper slices left and right, creates a breeze and hits cobwebs, I look under the shelf and, in the corner, a white egg sack and collapsed around it, a black spider, legs so short and thin it fails to cover the girth of the cotton ball nursery. This will be hard, removing mother and brood and keep them bonded, with a fear she’ll drop to the ground and run off abandoning the womb of her children, without knowing what kind of mother she would become under

I’m guessing it fell out of a shopping cart from an open box, tucked between a blanket and rags, a sidewalk’s bump freed it to roll away this faultless wheel of wheat, this breakfast frisbee stamped in quarters with perfect pockets for pools of butter and maple syrup its consumption never destined with condiments, napkin, silverware, a refillable coffee and chatty morning conversation more likely to be eaten under the shade of a tree or possibly while rolling and on the

they arrive perfect, don’t they? five flawlessly sprouted appendages a tiny nail for each pink perfection declaring the joy of being alive we kick those little pink members as hard as we can more living changes that stuffed into shoes and sneakers, some bend from dead ends others break from hard ends with even more life nails turn black or clawlike grow crooked, split or fall off toes no longer the sisterhood, a family of quintuplets, now living hard and alone som