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Web Worms
Katherine Maurer
A horror in squirming dens
suspended in the pecan tree
on the solstice they start to drop.
One falls, or two crawl across the balcony
cherry picker backing down the alley
chirps—a giant metal cricket. Cicadas
chatter and swell, breeze drones
through the fan in the window. Heat
lifts the mind like a half dead
helium balloon, so it touches
only lightly on anything, sweat
glows through eyelid skin,
the worm web ghosts in the trees,
stretched out by twigs like spacetime
gone haywire and who knows
where the worms went—sheet lightning
in a sky only pale gray overcast.
The pecan tree's leaves curl down--
ribs around a vacant chest
a few crisp dead ones float
in the webs of the missing worms.
On the solstice they started to drop—
the day we tipped
closest to the sun and thought
it might illuminate something, clung
like worms in the belly of a ghost
to the tipping planet.
© 2007 Katherine Maurer
Katherine Maurer received her MFA from the
University of Illinois in 2005. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Alaska Quarterly Review,
The Cincinnati Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, and Sycamore Review. She has
worked as a teacher, music promoter, community organizer, and assistant editor at both Ninth Letter
and the Dallas Poets' Community Press. She lives in Urbana, Illinois.
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