Zoo-Visitor’s Wife

I held your hand with a fascist grip,
still jealous to remind you how real
I am. Our fingers lace, thumbs wag,
as if we hold a spider between us,
its eight legs curled mercilessly
in drafty death: your fingertips hot
enough to bore through both our palms
to mine, hot like the split moment
the poison gushes in like semen.

The spider in his illuminated box
glistens orange in the heating coil,
paltry as a simile of jungle sun;
his diaphragm muffled in carapace,
no sign of life until he scuttles.

To scuttle is to end something,
usually in the face of imminent failure.

You do not tap the glass, deny desire
to cage, therefore, to care for.

Not-for-profit doesn’t mean free,
so we linger even at boring things,
like you do in a marriage you want
to continue. On the next wall, a green snake
looped into the shape of a woman’s hat
from the era without no-fault divorce
or Roe or Obergefell. It could be the past

or the future. I’d rather be anywhere
with you but here and now. The spider corpse
of our hands, the liquids clamming up inside
to make it brittle: I could snap
us out of it with the laugh I’m holding back.