Kathryn Kulpa
Boys Will Be
After all, fellows, all work and no play, and it’s only
a bit of fun, a piece
on the side.
Oh, they all had them, their
wartime secretaries, their Hollywood blondes
internal affairs, ha-ha.
Boys will be
a wink and a nod, a locker-room joke
He likes his bourbon aged
and his women
girls.
And now
What happens in the hotel room,
The dressing room,
The private island the offshore yacht
Stays in the bulging case files of a senescent spider.
A million victims shackled in silk
Will never be enough for this sleepless beast, growing ever more
Brazen, careless, still spinning its gilded web
Until it bloats and dies,
poisoned by its own corruption.
Kathryn Kulpa is the author of the prose poetry collection A Map of Lost Places (Gold Line Press, 2025) and the flash fiction chapbooks For Every Tower, a Princess (Porkbelly Press 2024), Cooking Tips for the Demon-Haunted (New Rivers Press, 2023) and Girls on Film (Paper Nautilus, 2015), as well as of the short story collection Pleasant Drugs (Mid-List Press, 2005) and a micro-chapbook Who’s the Skirt? (Origami Poems Project, 2014). Her work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Monkeybicycle, NANO Fiction, Smokelong Quarterly, The Sunlight Press, and other journals. Kulpa is flash fiction editor for Cleaver Magazine.
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You’ve captured it well.
Wonderful poem -- that spider image!!