BUGS

My mother used to kill rubber bands
Thinking they were bugs
Curly, insidious things at the edge
Of her sight
Waiting in peripheral perception
With extended antennae and filthy bug feet
Until my mother
Ninja of the kitchen
Would swat the peripheral bug
With the newspaper she was reading
Then lift the deadly newsprint
To find she had killed yet another
Rubber band

Eventually she started hanging the rubber bands
On door knobs
And hiding them in drawers
To keep herself from the tyranny
Of imagined bugs
At the edge of the world

It was only later that I came
To understand the metaphorical significance
Of this flawed human versus rumpled rubber
Slap down
What we see at the edge
Is not what is there
But a warped echo
Of how the world sings to us

The rubber band
Pulled from its frantic newsprint embrace
To rest in tangled ambush
Next to a reading woman
Could have been a piece of candy
Or a piece of cookie
Or a tiny kitten
Or a sliver of dream
Instead it was a bug
An invader and despoiler
Bent on domination and defecation
Of my mother’s house and life
And kitchen

I’ve been trying to look at
My periphery of late
Hoping to see rubber bands
And cookies
There is something there
But it is hard to see
Because it is, after all
At the edge of perception
I think it might be
A bug