Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday.

A spider’s overnight web

flashes my eye-corner
in a shift of morning
porch sunlight –

spun in a triangle,
base secured
to morning glory tendrils.
They arc enlaced
toward blank air, grope
at any nearest object.

Half-fingernail-sized,
the web weaver,
peach-orange, legs
ringed black.

She strung the anchor thread
up from the apex,
five feet to house wall.
It almost disappears
against sky-blue.

Picture the web-wedge
standing unsupported.

Her work
opens and shuts
in here-then-gone light.
She scuttles over
that single sky-blanked thread,
mid-air scrambling.

The web secures
house front
to morning glory
with one silk strand.

No anchor, no spider.
She drew
the whole construction
back into her body.

Morning glory
tendrils spring wild,
attached to the breeze.

David P. Miller’s collection, Bend in the Stair, was published by Lily Poetry Review Books in 2021. Sprawled Asleep (2019) was published by Nixes Mate Books. His poems have appeared in Meat for Tea, Lily Poetry Review, Solstice, Salamander, Cream Scene Carnival, Kestrel, Paterson Literary Review, Nixes Mate Review, and Jerry Jazz Musician, among other publications. Magma (UK) included two of his poems in an issue focused on teaching poetry to secondary school students. He lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, with his wife, the visual artist Jane Wiley.

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx