Five by
Thomas Fucaloro
Seeing Spiders
My mother’s been seeing spiders,
creep-crawling in the shadows of her brain
project onto what the window frames
My partner and I have moved into a new space
there are spiders everywhere, sometimes we let them live
sometimes they revert back to the shadows of our brains
I believe in energy, I believe whomever gave you life,
spins parallels, meeting when apart, I find my mania
when my mother is not around finding her suffering
I believe neurological webs bind us to the wall
collecting pray, spitting prey, my mother’s brain
is the silk spinnereted thread through mine
I didn’t catch it from her, I was caught by her
and have always tried to detach that thread
into corduroy
I have been seeing spiders in the mirror
splitting the brain, the shadows on the floor
project onto my window frames
But my partner and I have moved into a new space
This is how I burn bridges
And spin them anew
Laying on the edge of the bed
I find another thing I am trying
to escape from whether healthy
or not, I like to disappear and
reappear on the edge of some-
thing else, something truer
than silk. Perhaps polyester.
For those who talk without a pause button
The rabbit hole becomes filled
with dead-rabbit-conspiracies
I understand triggers
But I also understand triggers
tend to trigger
the listener sometimes
So, when you ask me
with a mouthful of
carrots, “What do you think?”
I can only stand there, pulling
out my eyelashes, one tooth
at a time
ode to the obeisance
Staring into me like rain
Filling and delicious and delicate and deadly
Art is a jelly filled doughnut
When you take a bite, it seeps out the sides
This is a beauty filled moment
You give it such categories to soften the blow
Because it’s really a bad back, it’s a bad day
Its anger filled with fistful thinking
It seeps from everywhere
The dead telling stories through the rain
A war hammer waiting for the bell to be cracked
A book you throw at someone’s head
An Emily Dickenson first draft
It’s the year of the mundane
It’s indifferent to your needs
But it can help you be better, like for instance,
You have some jelly on your already dead existence
Start there
The stress of not worrying
can it keep me
from falling apart
maybe I just need
one of those activity books
that relieve anxiety and stress
maybe time is an invisible string
you think you have it threaded but realize it’s safety pins
you need to be your own self-care-advocate
you need to hurt yourself, to make sure you still care
The winner of a performance grant from the Staten Island Council of the Arts and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, Thomas Fucaloro has been on six national slam teams. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the New School and is a co-founding editor of Great Weather for Media and NYSAI press. He is an adjunct professor at Wagner College and BMCC where he teaches world lit and advanced creative writing.