my neighbor has a bug zapper, and it stays on blue all night long. I turn on my fan and my humidifier to drown out the sound of insects constantly being drawn into its siren song and annihilated. 

For two summers I have stood at my window and listened to it sing in triumph as it claims another life. I can’t imagine how many each night. sometimes the sound lasts a long time, and I think it must be a sphinx moth, or even a bat, following prey into the light. it sounds so electric for so long. like wings stuck to a searing grate, convulsing. 

I wonder what it looks like in the morning underneath the light. and I wonder that the sound of the dead and dying doesn’t trouble their sleep. 

I’ve stared through a rifle sight and delivered a killing blow to a baby pig. But I find this machine barbaric.  

Today I saw a chipmunk sit in the middle of the road, eating the remains of a ground squirrel. 

Every night when I undress in front of the window, looking out into the blue dot in the blackness, listening to the sounds of it, I wonder why I don’t sneak out at five in the morning, unplug it, and smash it upon their front lawn. Or secret it away and hide it in a black plastic trash bag until suspicion has passed.

Same reason I don’t drive to deliver diapers to the captive children in Arizona. same reason I fiddle with the radio dial at the freeway offramp, where a gray old man, the same gray old man, cowers in the heat. Same reason I buy fried chicken and bacon. 

Same reason i kept driving the afternoon i watched the truck rend apart the doe, its legs kicking, belly cleaved from its chest cavity. Same reason I skirt around the drenched wings of a hawk moth, its magic powder drowned and draining. 

But I always let the wolf spiders I find in the sink free.

One morning I found two—one large, one small. The small one was missing several limbs, which were scattered onto the white porcelain in the bluedawn light. I imagined the night that had just passed, and I scooped the small one up in a quarter pint mason jar, the kind i drink whiskey out of most nights, and let him free at the front of the house.

The larger one I let out at the back.