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.



Ann Howells

If you have any thoughts on this poem,  Ann Howells   would be pleased to hear them.