El Retiro, Colombia
When I step naked into my shower,
I find, staring down at me,
its eight dark eyes peering over
the silver lip of the sprayer, a tarantula
the size of a bar of soap.
There’s a reason we tap out our shoes,
check behind pillows every night
before bed. Spiders and scorpions make
a daily pilgrimage of this house, through
windows and doors, to and from the jungle
that presses in on us from all sides.
How many have I displaced, or killed,
I wonder, looking up, surprised by this creature,
each of us weighing options: four pairs of legs
leaping into the falls and down the bluff
of my body. Or two, scrambling out
into the cold to fetch a broom.
And I think, not my shower today, but ours.
“You stay up there and look,” I hear myself say,
and with this a small peace forms between us.
My hands lather and scrub. The brown voyeur
drums one hairy finger just at the edge
of the cascade—that thin wet line
between curious and afraid, where each of us
must make a home.
Copyright © 2026 by AE Hines. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 5, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
