A big black spider, a table, a pile of papers: Q.R. Quasar's "Squashed" starts with a small domestic act of violence and then stretches it out to the size of the cosmos. The speaker is found "in my nest" by the Universe and flattened, "like" a spider the speaker once killed without needing to. The poem asks what it means to be on the receiving end of the same careless force you have used yourself, and then, in its last lines, what that force might be for.
The spider is the poem's most carefully drawn figure. It is "big black / beautiful", three adjectives piled up with obvious admiration, and that admiration makes the killing sting. The speaker's excuse arrives in brackets, "(but it surprised me / amongst my papers)", and the brackets sound like a defence muttered under the breath. Fear, not need, did the deed. The image of its "legs crumpled up / in retraction" is exact and a little tender. "Retraction" describes how a dying spider curls its legs in, but it also means taking back something said, and the speaker clearly wishes the act could be retracted. The word "papers" hints, judging by the imagery, that the speaker is someone who works with words, which matters by the end.
The poem is built on a refrain that changes. The first time, "the Universe found me / in my nest / and squashed me" runs as three short, blunt lines, as sudden as the blow. After the spider has been described, the sentence comes back, but now a stanza break falls between "nest" and "and squashed me", holding the foot in the air for a moment before it lands. The linking phrase "after / just so," is neat and cold. "Just so" means "in exactly that way", and it also sounds like a tidy shrug. The Universe and the speaker behave identically, and neither feels the need to explain.
Quasar writes in free verse, with short lines and no regular metre, so the poem's music comes from sound rather than pattern. The title word "Squashed" sets up a cluster of hard, spitting sounds, from "squashed" to "squeezed" to "speckled" to "speak," which ties the Universe's violence to the act of speaking. Capitalised "Its" and "It" give the Universe the dignity, and perhaps the menace, of a deity. Its "speckled wastes" and "void vasts" are lovely, strange phrases. "Speckled" makes the stars look like dust or flecks on a surface, and "wastes" can mean empty land but also leftover refuse. "Vasts" turns an adjective into a noun, as though space were so large that ordinary grammar had to stretch to describe it.
The last stanza changes the poem's direction. Being squashed becomes being "squeezed awake", and the pressure that crushes is also what creates a voice. The speaker is made "to speak Its endless emptiness / and, in traumic anguish, make / It thrive." "Traumic" reads like a coinage, a roughened version of "traumatic," as if pain had worn the word down. The poem's one clear rhyme, "awake" and "make", arrives here, at the moment of purpose, and the line break after "make" leaves the verb hanging before "It thrive" completes it. The reversal is striking. The Universe seems vast and self-sufficient, yet in the poem it needs a small, hurt creature to put its emptiness into words.
What makes "Squashed" worth reading is how it holds apart ideas that usually come as a pair. It admits that the cosmos is indifferent and that people are indifferent too, and it makes no excuses for the speaker. But it will not leave it at despair. The poem itself becomes the proof of its last claim: the speaker has been squeezed into speech, and the act of writing is how the emptiness is made to thrive. That is an unsettling kind of consolation, offered with dark humour and a small dead spider, and it avoids both self-pity and easy comfort.