Mom said,
watch out for the black widow spiders
in the blackberry vines that grew beside shed.
You can tell they’re black widows
because they are fat and shiny black
and have a red hourglass on their bellies.
And don’t eat those cherries
that fell in the grass.
The squishy ones
on the cement are warm
and covered with ants.
The red ones bite.
My favorite story In Sunday school
was Daniel in the lion’s den.
Because of the lion.
Mom stopped sending me
when I was four.
I always thought
it was after her Daddy,
a Baptist Sunday school teacher,
had died and there was
no need to please him anymore.
She told me a couple years ago
that wasn’t the reason.
She pulled me out after
the teacher told her
that I’d said that
I wanted to know about the devil.
And she hadn’t answered.
She didn’t want me to go to classes
where my questions went unanswered.
I found out about the devil
all on my own. It took years.
I brought a black widow
home in a tissue one day
Mom said, is it dead?
No, just stunned,
I knocked it on the head.
We put it in a jar
and it revived.
she said, this won’t do.
Put some nail polish remover
on a cotton ball and dropped
that in the jar.
Now it’s safe, she said.
