I found five
                    dying cockroaches
on the bathroom floor.
They lay on their thin brown wings,
black legs twitching
                                   pointlessly
in the air.

+

There were always cockroaches in Texas—
black spots on the ceiling,
                                            scratching behind the walls.
I sometimes heard them
clumsily traversing
                               the cabinet beneath the sink.
All I could do
                           was spray

+

and a stinging cloud
                                      filled their air,
settling as mist over the countertops,
over the bathroom sink.
                                          Then the cockroaches
would convulse
                           into view, their wings
trembling.

+

They’re looking for water,
my wife said
                      from the sofa, where she was reading
a book about the great plague.
                                                They’re lost
and confused.
                      Still, I swept their weightless
crisp bodies
                      into the dustpan,
then tilted them into the garbage can.

+

We were living
                        in dangerous times then.
I had never found myself so at odds
with my own country.
                                    I tried not to think about it
too much,

+

                        sweeping cockroaches
from the kitchen corners,
the news on TV filling the room
with horror,
                     the last days of a system
of government
                        I had, over a lifetime,
learned to love.

+

                                 A great mist fell,
a burning mist.
                          They’re looking for security,
my wife would say,
but I didn’t care.
                            I could hear them
in the desk drawers
chewing up my poems.
                                      One trilled
right up my arm.

+

In bed,
              I closed my eyes
and green mists
                         descended over townships,
over cooling highways—
how Texas spread outward
                                              into the vast
arterial

+

                          poisoned nation,
the strip malls,
                           the snow-speckled streets
of Midwestern towns
I’d passed through once
                                       but could hardly remember,
their silos and corrugated strip clubs,
Jesus billboards,
                           green obscuring mists,
great gray semis
hurtling through,
                              headlights that made
green cones of light
in the toxic air—

+

                                Five of them
on the bathroom floor
                                        that night
before everything changed for me—

I could hear them,
                                the fluttering.
They were trying to right themselves.