» Poetry
Two Poems
Poem I Wish to Title with the Species Name of My Least Favorite Palmetto Bug but Can’t Because There Are So Many Candidates; or, Another Invasion
The inspector says the name’s a misnomer,
that the great bugs of my childhood were not,
in fact, the Florida woods roaches that dwell
in the fans of cabbage palms and saw palmettos
(uniformly dark, slow-moving, emitting
a foul smell) but American cockroaches
(brown-bodied, tan head), and those are different still
from the smoky-brown cockroaches creeping across
my present-tense living room floor in the mornings.
And still “palmetto bugs” were what we called them,
little winged bombs of misery that dropped
into our beds or rustled behind cupboards
or scuttled into cracks at a beam of light
or, worse, flew at the lamp or the hand on the switch.
At Palmetto High, our unofficial mascot
paraded the halls in poorly painted murals:
think smiling blue cartoon palmetto bug
as Mozart to designate the music wing;
palmetto bug beside a bust of Shakespeare
and holding a feathered quill; palmetto bug
astride a spinning globe. You get the idea.
If I say the phrase “palmetto bug” enough,
do you think it could lose all meaning, the way
so many swarmed from the bottom row of lockers
in the girls’ side of the gym that after a while
we gave up screaming? They became a kind of static
we ignored. Yet the isolated bug—
the sudden intrusion on a wall or ceiling
in a place I should feel safe—still makes me quake
and call for my husband who doesn’t understand
my helpless terror, that I am a child again
in Miami, slipping bare feet into shoes and meeting
the dry armored back with my soft skin.
The cold click of toe against wing. The scramble
of those legs like filaments across my foot,
and my foot trapped inside. Or the wet smear
of their crushing. I learned to check my sneakers,
to tap, then shake them out. A friend tells me
she attended a dinner party where a roach
dropped onto a guest’s salad plate, and I think
of this story every time I host. Each month
the guy who sprays blames the weather—too hot,
too cool, too much rain, not enough—so we’ve called
his boss, who checks the crawl space and the attic
and finds no scurrying, no sign of nests.
“They really don’t like living in houses,”
he tells us. “They’re just passing through.”
He smiles as if this settles everything,
as if the walls that look so safe and solid
weren’t permeable and crawling in the dark.
“Another Day in Paradise,”
my father said without a trace of irony
each time my family drove to Miami Beach
or Coconut Grove or beneath the outstretched arms
of banyan trees on the old canopy roads,
the roads he’d driven since high school. He’d lift
one hand—or both—off of the steering wheel
to gesture at whatever we were passing:
blue bay, cruise ships or pleasure boats, sunlight
on a white bridge, a perfect specimen
of palm. Despite the heat, the traffic, the car-
jackings and home invasions, he says it still:
“Another day in Paradise.” He can’t
imagine better.
“All good things come to an end,”
the owner of a sandwich-and-cupcake shop told me
when I said I was sorry his place was closing.
Then he caught himself: “Except Paradise.
That has no end.” He was so pleased by the thought
he repeated it and walked off, whistling.
This was the small town where we’d moved for work,
the bakery the only decent place to eat
for miles. We never felt at home living there,
though I’m not sure there’s anywhere I’d feel
at home. Isn’t that why I travel, always
looking for something to make me want to stay?
The baker’s whistle, my father’s sweeping hand—
maybe what I envy is their certainty.