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| Recently Published Poetry
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Silverfish Silverfish can survive without food for months. And they are harmless-- unless you are some sort of starch: Cheerios, say, or the glue that binds books, the sizing that crisps a new blouse, the gloss on a magazine page. Silverfish like dark, warm places--dry or damp, they don’t care. They live under sinks and stoves and floors, around water pipes, behind baseboards, on bookshelves, in closets and bathtubs: the chosen home of the ugly slithery thing I found on the lip of the drain. Slithery, ugly, harmless-- except it brought back childhood: the years of Life and New Yorkers Daddy stored in a giant box under the cellar stairs--not the stairs Mommy fell down, but the cellar where the cat died giving birth, where the front-loading Bendix tumbled wash over and over, blouses and panties and sheets tangled with Mommy’s stumble-bum gait, her half-baked meals, her shrieks (you no-good kids will be sorry when I’m gone), her death that began when my sister was born, all the things I couldn’t sort out no matter how many books I read, how many times I poured milk on my sisters’ corn flakes or roasted a chicken or folded the laundry or emptied the ironing basket, first sprinkling the cottons, then rolling them up to dampen, just as Mommy directed. The silverfish, loathsome and quick, lived in that big box, slithering into the musty depths each time we pulled the lightbulb chain, unfolded the cardboard flaps, and foraged for photos to bulk up our projects for school-- never finding just what we needed, always hungry for something more. Published in Willow Review, Spring 2005 |
