“Spider-Woman” is one of three haunting and fantastically surreal prose poems by Satoshi Iwai in our Summer 2017 issue.

{ X }

SHE IS FALLING DOWN from a height of 30,000 feet to the thoughtless land where she has served as a careless agent. Someone whom she has never known betrayed her and bombed the airplane. Watching her colleagues being carbonized in every second, she wonders whether the thread of her white silk dress is longer or shorter than 30,000 feet. The hem of the dress was cut by a broken glass when she was thrown out of the window. The glittering thread is being unweaved in every second. At a height of 20,000 feet, her butt has already been exposed. At 5,000 feet, she starts shaking with cold. In her eyes, thousands of old spires grow bigger and bigger. Her grief and shame reach a height of 30,000 feet along the white silk thread.

An hour later, she is still falling down while the coroner pours her brain tissue into a small cup.

{ X }

SATOSHI IWAI was born and lives in Kanagawa, Japan. He writes poems in English and in Japanese. His English work has appeared in Heavy Feather Review, RHINO, Small Po[r]tions, Your Impossible Voice, Poetry Is Dead, and elsewhere.