Filed under: Poetry
Let’s say, on
an overheated Saturday afternoon,
that you opened your bathroom cabinet
to find a 2-inch long cockroach,
perched atop your new toothbrush,
antenna held aloft like twin scepters,
testing the breeze.
What would you do?
I suspect the gallant would have gotten a glass
and scrap of paper
and carried it to safer shores,
but I took my last copy of the New Yorker, rolled it into a baton,
and followed the shocked scramble into the depths
of the bathtub, where I crushed the delicate
clockwork of its prehistoric brain
and scattered nimble limbs across the porcelain.
It is always shocking how easy killing can be,
especially faced with an unexpected enemy.
A toothbrush becomes a battleground,
a bathroom, a russet-tiled graveyard. I find myself
defending odd corners of my life with the temerity
of a freedom fighter, cutting a bloody swath across what
I consider to be mine.
