Listen to the world’s best poetry read out loud.

The only spider I ever loved was sitting in the kitchen sink, after my night’s meditation in the outside porch, two of its long black legs probing enamel sides. I cannot lie. I’ve killed many spiders in my time, but that night, after the neck and the knee, on repeat, repeat, my only thought was: what would black Jesus do?

I cloched a see-through tumbler over, placed a strip of card under, walked gingerly beneath fluorescent light, as if leading him away from Death’s boarding gate. Threw him into the grass outside, where a cat, not long before, had crawled along the fence and sat in the rays of my meditative gaze in the darkness. Legs tucked beneath the cushion of her comfort, she’d basked in the throb of my mantra.

The only spider I ever loved scrambled into the weeds, where the only cat I ever inspired had sat; left one of her lives for the spider to find in the grass. And sometimes, when I don’t find the time to meditate – a way to take a break from life’s suffocations – I envy that cat, who basked in my calm. And the spider – who did not know how rare such mercy was. Or that his life had been in danger.