Jeff Latosik

A HUMANE SPIDER REMOVAL SERVICE

– seen on a subway car ad for Go Daddy


They show up in their saffron robes,
no scheduled date, no number
you could call to offer your complaint.

Grown men and women, quiet,
you guess they wouldn’t fare well anywhere
rallied in this strange sainthood.

No gloves. No plasticky contraption.
The service uses only hands.
You may have heard it’s deadly work

in the south. One person extracts
the creature; another salvages the web
with tiny pincers that a naked eye can barely see.

Is there a windless, winterless place
to set that small world down within?
The abattoir is far from here, you’ll almost say

and all the dairy in the fridge is cage-free.
They’ll nod and closely read the trim
and cupboard corners as if the everyday were scripture.

Then, requiring nothing, they leave.
You watch them hobble on the road
now cupping their hands, the rain, the wind.

You’ve heard that recruitment happens in this moment.
Even now some people have been known
to simply up and leave to follow the service for their days.

It’s true a wife or father’s often left behind
by this sudden apostasy. Meanwhile the spiders go on
spinning their reasons from nothing.



Jeff Latosik’s latest collection of poetry is Dreampad (McClelland & Stewart, 2018). Recent work has appeared in Poetry Magazine and The Walrus and is forthcoming in The West End Phoenix. Jeff is a member of the InkWell Workshops Collective. He lives in Toronto.