The Kingdom in Our Kitchen
My reflection passes over
a mosquito stuck to the mirror,
her lips, like little suction cups,
locking her with her reflection,
in a cloud of steam from the shower,
like God’s face in the cloud above the Sinai.
I place my hands against the doorframe
like Samson, unaware of the Hair-
Max magnet slipping with the weight
of a roaches authority, from my fridge
with its baby roaches buried under layers
of ice beneath the freezer— roach cryogenics—
a Pleistocene ice age for the brave few
who dared enter this refrigerator’s
Promised Land of sour milk and Honey
Nut Cheerios. One roach plays Moses, reddening
dishwater with tomato sauce, seeking me—
Yahweh from this roaches summit.
I cast the spiders out— clinging like spindly claws
to their inheritance of crumbs spilling
like manna from my pantry paradise.
I damn them with fire for plucking
the bitter fruit of knowledge from my back
crumbled and caked with dust as Babylon.
The usual highways and byways buzzing
above my head, dive-bombing me, I sweep
the sea of fallen bodies from my floor
and shake their shucked shells into the trash,
after my roommate rained a nuclear winter
of Black Flag over my fleeing subjects.
But my fellow roaches are resilient.
They are fruitful and multiply
regardless of what tribulations come.
And when, by flood or fire, the world
is ravaged beyond belief, they will
inherit the earth and all that is within it.
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