IN A SPIDER'S WEB.

[dadio]

She’s well aware of the psychiatrist’s
superior sense of air, as if he didn’t
stink after a hard won shit, she thinks
to herself sitting in the hard chair
the other side of his expensive desk.

His desk, she notices, has photographs
placed here and there of a woman and
children well fed and well stuffed, no
doubt, in the woman’s case, the golden
frames catching the sun’s light, picking
out the prime features of the woman’s
scared stare. He’s speaking to her in that
tone he has, how it worms its way into her,
the words oily as if oozed from his lips like
sardines from a can. She sits tight lipped,
her eyes scanning his face, settling now
and then, like some butterfly, on this plump
features and then that hidden penis, not
sure if he knows she isn’t listening to the
essence of his oily poured out words.

Her hands plunge between her thin thighs,
pushing into the place where babies push out,
or so she was told, her mother probably or
some other she’d rather not think of now.

He sits back in his chair as if he expected an
answer to his words, his hands folded across
his paunch like two octopuses bathing in the
sun on the beach. She sits stiff and unopened,
her lips tight together, and her knees touching,
pushing against each other to allow none in,
not into her mind, her heart or her clammed
up vagina, unlike her open all hours, mother.