Parental Role Models from the Arachnid Family a poem in unrhymed quatrains of iambic pentameter Extend along the wires taut beneath you, spread your legs in all the principle directions of the compass, one leg north, the second northwest, eight in all unfurled. Your children navigate along these lines to tender flesh of your bare abdomen. Their tiny mandibles incise a slit and then insert two hairy pedipalps, which spread the wound. They plunge mouth first and gorge until their heads are buried in the sack of your eviscerated torso. That's one way to go about it. Who am I to argue with your final sacrifice? With your one hundred children, you have more experience as parent than myself, who have just this one child. I named mine Ruth. And if a grisly vivisection would enhance her chances of true happiness I might be more inclined to contemplate your practice of supreme nobility. Instead, I hang around, a spider on a web, awaiting opportunities to leap, to catch a fly, to wrap in silk this present, which I lay then at her feet. I harbor thoughts that I am worth more than the protein in my body. Only time will tell if this is a preposterous, illusory, mammalian conceit.