my brother shows me the aquarium of roaches
their long gloriously firm ancient crawling bodies.
he says once he hadn’t fed them for weeks
and when he came back a ripped-off leg was still moving.
would you like to keep moving like that or are you giving up
and wanting the fuck out of this world sooner? in a way i can’t blame you
but i don’t like when people vote for death it is like if we can just ride this out together
maybe we’ll be our best interconnected selves but i

can’t get over the bees dying.
when i look at a catalpa tree that once used to buzz
the whole thing a voluptuous sexy mass of vibrating long-tongued speckled
white flowers now it’s notable when a single bee is cupped inside a bud.
they say the bees might be completely gone within three generations
of course people want to get the hell out.

i am telling you
being human has meant to take and to love and in loving has meant to bend over
the warm rock and be inside all that is perfect and yet when you looked around
you realized it was still an unfriendly and violent place to anyone besides the well-off white
people and even the friend’s child you had watched grow from a funny-headed baby

became a teenager thinking nazis cool, transgressive.
i want to tell him i would have been one of those clawing
for the door in the gas chamber.
and he’d have carefully placed the lumps of zyklon b.
maybe in different circumstances, i would have done it too.

still the question of what is a poem for
to break open the world people trapped in prisons
or solace like a balm you take at night
driving the long road home with easy listening
on the stereo oozing into that blank space a kind of leopard print omelet
in the morning with the eggs broken over the silver bowl
or like an advice column where she tells you what to do with your shame your self doubt.

so humans will die out does it really matter
it matters that we went out with a kind of inequality
where i had a laptop on my thighs at night and listened to the crow and the car
and the rain and you went out with two children dying of dysentery
and my call for revolution was a tinny white voice down the long hallway
of the city and in time

i went back where my smallness was not a problem
and everyone was glad to see i had made nests in my hair

where i was raising my own montessori waldorf gentle kind inquisitive
block-stacking children and we ate five walnuts and one avocado each
popped pills for the ache of our brains
and did zumba in the radiant floor livingrooms to keep our bodies just the right kind
of middle class small
and meanwhile the bees the bats the frogs the lions the bears 
were shrunken cartoons on gluten-free gorilla crunch cereal boxes.

i am telling you
being human has meant to take and to love and in loving
has meant to bend over the warm rock and be inside all that is perfect
and yet when you looked around
you realized you were just a leg torn off, still twitching.

(by Becca Shaw Glaser. originally published in Columbia Journal, November 2016.)