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30 Poems in 30 Days
Michael with a “B”
Poem the twelfth
Sometimes I am afraid of insects —
the sudden skittering panicky jerks,
the clacking pinchers or hard carapace,
the muchtoomuchness of too many legs.
A fun fact from my childhood is
when my sister jumped into the leaf-pile
we didn’t know there was a hornets’ nest
waiting to swarm us as we screamed.
A fun fact from my childhood is
I thought it was a grasshopper so I
swept it off my jumper without fear
until its stinger taught me otherwise.
A fun fact from my childhood is
I held Erin’s swelling tongue down
with my fingers to keep her airway open
as she thrashed with panic at the picnic.
A fun fact about me now is
I always tap a Pepsi can left outside,
in case something with too many legs
has crawled inside, lurking in the sweetness.
The title of this poem is a reference to a Vine (God, I really am old) that went like this:
