The Kingdom in Our Kitchen, first appeared in Avocet: A Journal of Nature Poetry

The Kingdom in Our Kitchen

My reflection passes over
a mosquito stuck to the mirror
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.
I cast the spiders out,
clinging like spindly claws
to their inheritance of crumbs
spilling like manna from the paradise
of my pantry. 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.