4X2
an online poetry journal
Photo by Melissa Hotchkiss
Big Bang
by Pete Follansbee
Then there was the day
I showed the schoolchildren
the wolf spider I had
collected from the floor
and onto a page of paper
so as not to kill her but
to show her humanely
outside.
But before I could
get her to the door,
she slipped, like an idea,
off the page, and fell
to the white tile floor
where, to our surprise, her
so-many babies splashed
away like drops from an object
fallen in, say, a pond or a lake
or even an ocean, for
the size of the expanse of
water makes no difference;
it’s simply the impact and its
so-many arcs of consequence, the
trajectories already decided
by the speed and angle
of the fall.
And on this day, the mother
spider fell from perhaps two
feet and the expanse she hit
was solid white tile, but still
her children splashed so beautifully
off her back and away, not a one
hurt nor the mother, all
of whom scattered like drops
so quickly to the edges of the
slick and shiny floor, and to the walls
and any edge of darkness they
could find to get away from this
light, this broad and cold
openness, this sudden and barren air.
Poet's Statement: While the title, "Big Bang," alludes to that moment when the universe began, the poem's inspiration emerged from a very small-scale and local event: the "explosion" of baby wolf spiders off their mother's back and body. Still, this small event prompted startled amazement from me and the two witnesses who were with me. Our amazement eventually subsided into concern, mainly for the mother and her so many babies, all scattered across the floor of their new universe. And sometime soon thereafter, the poem itself exploded—though very quietly—into being.
Bio: Currently, Pete Follansbee's poem, "Outside In," appears in the inaugural edition of Beyond Words, an arts journal out of Berlin, Germany. Also, a recent poem, "Four-Year-Old-Child, Falling" is online (poem number 4) in the January issue of 8 Poems, and Pete's "Dark Heart," about the tragic Charlottesville alt-right demonstrations three summers ago, is still online at the About Place Journal (in Vol V, Issue IV "Infinite Country"). Pete's work has also appeared in The New Guard, The Atticus Review, and The North American Review, as well as in other journals. An MFA graduate from The University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, Pete currently lives and teaches in the newly hip city of Richmond, Virginia.