Spotted Orb Weaver

I discover her in dawn’s grey
ust as the summer thunderstorm wraps up
its nocturnal cabaret
lording over her web
woven overnight
on the outside of the sliding glass door   

When she interrupts
her industrious packaging
of multiple stultified insects
& lowers the upturned entirety
of her white-spotted-black-underbellied self 
down from her perch
until her gaze is level with mine
I’m     instantly     besotted      

Her face     bordered in fur     for a moment
is more mammalian than arachnid—     

staring into her bat eyes    
I am five years old   
in my bed in the dark     awake  

I can hear my father smashing a dresser
or headboard against the wall in my parents’ room     

heavier thuds than when he punches holes through doors    
the floor shaking with his screams    

lamplight shining in through my window  
glows in the eyes of my bat friend
looking down at me from the ceiling vent      

I won’t find out until I’m seven
that he was actually a roof rat…                        

Above the door
in a crack beneath the awning    
she hides from sunup till nightfall
but will streak out into the daylight
to process & abscond with any victim
that is sizeable enough for its struggle
to register on her silken Richter scale        

Sometime this fall she’ll become diurnal    
search for a mate
& create an insulated egg sac—
a gold-tinged bulbous jewel
like a mini Christmas tree ornament—
which she will secure to the web 
where her thousand tiny progeny will overwinter
once she dies in the season’s first freeze 
having barely made it a full twelve months
her resplendent chonkiness notwithstanding  

I shall call her Delilah        

Sestina for a Queen: Northern Cardinal 

Beaking black oil sunflower seeds, you face
down a dry leaf that slips in on the wind,    
a warning the juncos heed… There’s wildfire
alight in your eyes, as you steal sidelong
glimpses of your red-feathered swain. Your tail
fans toward his cat-calls to snub, out-of-hand,  

his display of early-March ardor—its hand
in your glee aside, his black, baffled face
is just too sweet… That’s it, give him a tail
ruffle to lift his spirits—let the wind
bare your pheromones’ warm truth: you belong
to him. Sunbeams in your fuzzy crest’s fire   

incite more songs. Each crimson glint of fire 
shimmying in your wingtips has a hand    
in his vigor to dig in for the long   
frozen weeks till spring again shows her face
(seeking the north’s greener prospects) to wind
her balmy way in from the Gulf & dovetail   

with daylight’s surge burgeoning fat cattail
reeds in culverts abloom with bergamot fire.
Nesting in the white pine, safe from the wind, 
you’ll find out Romeo’s fortes first-hand:
When your frantic hatchlings beg will he face
his fatherly onus with grace, or long 

for bachelorhood? Any bets on how long
he’ll keep up the ruse when the fledglings tail
him everywhere? Will he shun that blameless face
of your one cowbird chick who eats like fire
in a dry gulch in August? Watch him hand
off foraging lessons as soon as the wind 

kicks up June’s first thunderstorm… You could wind
up an old brooding hen before the long 
days start to wane… Oh, but you’ve got to hand
it to those kisses of his—        no detail 
missed, not a seed-heart left unstripped! What fire 
his coral-beaked pecks blaze across your face! 

Though the wind sets your tail-plumes aflutter
as his wooing stokes your long-burning fire, 
a queen’s face shall speak for your handmaid’s heart. 

Requiem

In my dream of the tree farm
I came upon you, silver birch,
in your autumn nakedness,  

reaching up
for fistfuls of lapis-stone sky;
“You’re perfect!” I heard myself 

pronounce, wanting you to be
my own, sculpted David.
Then I watched as  

they dug you up with a backhoe,
power-washed away the dirt
where you clung & rent  

you with ropes, severing
your roots. Every.       One.
I only learned after the deed was done  

I’d condemned you to a warehoused winter
of desiccating rhizomes
before you’d even be delivered: 

They said I could let you take
your chances, or pay to have you
wrapped & reduce your risk  

of molding by up to 30 percent,
though neither option would prevent
a beetle-infestation. Now I had to decide:  

Whitewash my crime, or face
a future of having neglected
to try? As for why—  

why my dream-mind made
your brutal uprooting,  
I can’t say. I only know:  

This eternity
now snatches at my heels,  
hounding me awake…                        

Author’s Biography

Stephanie L. Harper is a neurodivergent poet, mother, and transplant from Oregon now living in Indiana with the world's most adorable husband and cat. She earned her BA in English & German from Grinnell College, IA, and MA in German from the University of Wisconsin – Madison; homeschooled and raised her extraordinary children to adulthood in Oregon; and completed her MFA in Poetry at Butler University in Indianapolis, IN. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Caesura, Crab Creek Review, The Iowa Review, Laurel Review, Red Wheelbarrow, Resurrection Magazine, Salamander Magazine, Taos Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere.