Arachne in Detention

So this is the ripe crop of hubris;
    time pissed out in the bio room,

nothing desk-wise but dust and cobwebs
    to catch it. Wire-hung anatomy laminates

break the body down, muscles to ligaments:
    plastinated, map-flat prints of skin-shed

bodyworks rendered painterly, pink,
    edges more defined for being shrunk.

As punishments go, this is no rock
    dropped and pushed and dropped

for eternity; it's starvation for the sultry clasp
    of boiling fleece and color. It's bug legs

in nectar. This floor is more
    web than weft, and I've been reborn

a speck, bored in a room of rooms,
    spider too tiny to nettle Athena's loom.

An owl has leaped from the window, gone
    hunting, pudgy with options. But my indigo

is ballpoint at best: doodles (Zeus
    loves Leda, or Europa) needled in heartloops

(or Danae) on the desk. Gravity, the law
    that all things drop—unless they're gods

—to their assigned seats, keeps this chamber
    of delinquents in business. Lift the amber

of my schoolroom sunward, and you'll see me,
    distorted in its prismatic cast, peeling

up at the corners like those body diagrams,
    their flat meat. I scratch my name in, not to be forgotten.

Copyright © 2010 Saara Myrene Raappana All rights reserved
from Cave Wall
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission