By Luanne Castle
The Spider is Blue, The Wolves are Asleep
(after Justin Hamm’s No Selfies)
As the timepiece beats its desperate march
the blue spider rambles across the page
in counterpoint, collecting all into its pouch,
the divulging image of the self-reflective demons,
sleeping wolves, gilt goodness, and the empties.
But should the spider animate all those legs
to coordinate over a longer distance, into
the pine forest that lies between the church
and the parsonage, will you follow, not lose track
of your false treasures the spider has stolen?
Rip the paper to reveal rather than to destroy.
What lies behind it all? The spider is blue
to draw attention away from the ogres we house.
Instead, stop amidst the trees, grasp a bough,
and dissolve the snow with your tongue.
About the Author:
Luanne Castle’s poetry and prose have appeared in Copper Nickel, River Teeth, Your Impossible Voice, JMWW, Grist, Fourteen Hills, Verse Daily, Disappointed Housewife, Lunch Ticket, Saranac Review, Pleiades, Cleaver, Anti-Heroin Chic, Bending Genres, BULL, The Mackinaw, The Ekphrastic Review, Phoebe, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Gone Lawn, Burningword, Superstition Review, One Art, Roi Fainéant, Dribble Drabble, Flash Boulevard, O:JA&L, Sheila-Na-Gig, Thimble, Antigonish Review, Longridge, Paragraph Planet, Six Sentences, Gooseberry Pie, Switch, and Ginosko. She has published four award-winning poetry collections. Her hybrid flash memoir, Scrap: Salvaging a Family, is forthcoming from ELJ Editions in 2026.