The spider’s consciousness lives outside of her body — By Claudia Ninotchka Acevedo-Quiñones

artwork by Ciara Duffy

The poem I won’t write is in the pills that sag my stomach. In the widening space between me 

and any other’s hands is another poem I won’t write. In the gaps of my radiator, never fully cleared, a poem: The spider’s consciousness lives outside of her body—her webs—like some 

mothers’. They write: This helped me catch you. This is how you tried to killed me. There is at least one poem for me there, all of them there for the spider, until they’re cleared and then 

rewritten and then never the same. There is a poem in the waking up to all my voices, shouting at me from different points in the circle of time. A poem on my face for the man who called me 

ma’am. No need to show ID. Yes, a poem for me there, too. Leaving the house after a week in bed, to walk, to find another wearing the same shoes: a poem there. 

I have a room full of cardboard, just like my mother, unused closets and pantries full of poems I won’t touch because I haven’t flattened the boxes. Because the bank account, the 

undriven car, the weight of being my own man, carrying myself to the mountain, the dealer, the store—that right there is a poem I’m tired of writing. Go back to the body, the spider says, 

because she can’t. This is the poem I can’t write, the poem I’m supposed to write. The poem to show the unconscious her body. The poem to save all poems. The poem that stays. The poem 

in the breath I don’t take. The poem that could clear me, so I clear it instead. 

Claudia Ninotchka Acevedo-Quiñones has three different versions of her name listed across government-issued documents. She could be anyone. She could be no one. Her first book, The Hurricane Book, was published by Rose Metal Press in 2023. Some of her poems and short stories have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, wildness, Ambit Magazine, Radar Poetry, and other publications. She lives in Upstate New York.