The terror is in the way it holds you.

Eight months pregnant,
I hang a clothesline in the back lawn.

In the nursery window, a garden spider
embraces its tightwoven prey. Anonymous

in gauze-white. Moth, horsefly,
creature that thought it had given

wide berth the arcing legs,
the center-poised X. They become husk.

My clothespins like the barn swallows,
solemn, well-spaced

on the wire between our home
and the distant, unseen next.