She (yes)—looking like slate, like 
all the pre-Cambrian stone—hooks herself 
to my pill bottle top and grasps. 
Just the two of us here in the pre-dawn:
the dogs sleep on, but her pincers, 
her carapace. I’ve been making myself 
breakfast oh a decade, unclogging my sink,
toting furniture on my hip. I’ve been mowing
my summer lawn with my red 
mower I bought at Walmart and lifted 
into my car trunk for the ride home. These
muscles have known rage. I’ve been 
corralling the grass clippings into the  
compost I pay the city to fetch, filling
mine and the kids’ prescriptions.  
I’ve been surprised by the number 
of tasks inside each chore: earn the money
before you spend it, shop for vegetables, pay
the money needed to possess them, then
lift them each one from the car trunk until they
sit next to me on the white linoleum. 
I’ve picked glass pieces from this evergreen’s  
arms when my storm window crashed in wind. 
I’ve been the last to wipe the sink 
and the only to tame the stubborn 
bathroom grout with bleach pens. When 
a pipe blew in the polar vortex  
and soaked the plaster, I threw my water main
in ninety seconds. Every bulb that burns 
out. Every hole that needs spackled.  
No one has killed a bug for me in a lifetime. 
The sun cracks orange-pink over the back deck.
I have rescued spiders and ants with a  
cheerful carry to the green outside. Today, I
plan her murder. She won’t escape. Something  
in her prehistoric tilt offends me and I’m 
set on red revenge. When I want the stink bug 
dead, I want her dead 
and I will kill her: crush and flatten 
down the center of her shield. I will do it
myself until I hear her crack and let go. 
If she asks me, I’ll tell her this is not her place 
or time, that she doesn’t get to choose 
her aliveness. I’ll flush all of her—legs, 
​slate pieces, appetite—in a watery grave  
as the sun lights my kitchen sink on fire.

Cameron Gearen's full-length collection, Some Perfect Year, came out from Shearsman Press in 2016. Her essays and poems have appeared in The Washington Post, Hippocampus, Dame Magazine, The Antioch Review, Green Mountains Review, Fence, River Styx, and many other journals. She has benefited from a Barbara Deming Money for Women grant. Former US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky selected her chapbook for publication. She was the Hemingway Writer-in-Residence from 2017-2019. She lives in River Forest, Illinois.
image: rene bohmer via unsplash