![dash](xdash.gif.pagespeed.ic.Zpz0F9uiR3.png)
To a Cockroach
Gran’s recipe for vichyssoise
slips irretrievably
through a hair-breadth gap,
is chewed to lace.
Your burgeoning brood,
teeming generations,
connoisseurs of spillage, spoilage,
seduced by a splash of marinara
staining the wallpaper, are stealthy,
await dark to pilfer, pillage, plunder
canisters of flour, sugar,
coffee, tea, flip-top trash bin.
But, it’s stealth be damned at 3:00 am
when I stumble to the kitchen,
flip the switch.
Flaunting fecundity --
your rapacious hoard swarms
in fluid Rorschach,
vanishing as if by prestidigitation
into minute cracks,
crevices beyond my scrub and scour.
![cockroach](241cockr.jpg)
Ann Howells
If you have any thoughts on this poem, Ann Howells would be
pleased to hear them.
![logo](newlogo.gif)