Follansbee

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.