Lunch Break – “Cockroach Ode”
“Lunch Break” is a monthly poetry column by Lim Xin Hwee, appearing every fourth Friday of the month. Look for insightful appreciations of contemporary poems from around the world. Sign up for notifications here.
Cockroach Ode
By Craig Santos Perez
My oldest memory
is waking from a nap
to a cockroach staring
at me. It doesn’t move
as I clutch its dark body
with my toddler fingers.
When I bite down, it hisses
—legs, wings, fluttering.
Have you ever seen
a decapitated cockroach
scurry? Today, rising seas
threaten their populations
because they can’t swim.
Don’t worry: they breed
a fuck-you, will-to-thrive,
there-are-too-many-of-us
attitude. They’re the first
terrestrial beings to birth
in space. Pre-Jurassic,
post-nuclear, future-milk.
They’ve learned to avoid
the violent light of human
eyes. I can still feel
its antennae searching
my tongue for the foul
saliva of extinction.
Blessed be the cockroaches,
for they shall inherit
the warming earth.
In an interview with Mashable, Tim Kring, the head of the Entomology Department at Virginia Tech, said of cockroaches, “If it wasn’t for us they wouldn’t be flourishing," citing our provision of shelter, food, and water in our homes. He continues, "They don’t want to hurt our populations. In a way, they’re farming us by not spreading disease to us.” To be “farmed” by cockroaches, which are commonly seen as the inheritors of this earth, appears to be our predicament. ‘Cockroach Ode’ from Habitat Threshold by Craig Santos Perez offers a spin on this inheritor trope.
I was surprised by the use of the word “farm”. Cockroaches “farm” benevolently by not spreading diseases to humans. This is such a contradiction to the way we have always farmed and cultivated: in extremely painful, destructive, and unsustainable ways. The poem highlights such violence towards animals in general and depicts it as inherent to humans. A toddler instinctively picks up a cockroach and, out of sheer curiosity, decapitates it by biting on it. The “foul/ saliva of extinction” alludes to the idea that the consumption habits of human beings are responsible for the disappearance of species. The description of cockroaches as “post-nuclear, future-milk” indicts the perception that we hold towards the role creatures play on this earth. We remember their existence by catastrophes that we caused, like nuclear pollution, and chart their future through the ways they contribute to us, for example, as an alternative protein.
This poem offers another way to view cockroaches. Instead of positioning them simply as inheritors of a deteriorating earth, the speaker implies that cockroaches are worthier of living on this earth than we are, especially since we are the ones who continue to destroy it. When the speaker bites down on the cockroach, it “hisses” and “flutter[s]”. Decapitated, it still “scurries”, showing signs of life and the will to escape impending death.
In our race to conquer outer space, cockroaches have beaten us, since they were the “first/ terrestrial beings to birth/ in space”. Our defeat in this endeavour evinces that this conquest was not for us to begin with, even to find an alternative place to survive in. Although cockroaches will inherit the earth, they need not stay here. However, we do, since there is no guarantee of space success for us. Cockroaches are naturally disposed to live anywhere, yet they are not the ones destroying this planet. The absurdity of human beings destroying the planet and looking elsewhere to live instead is thus made more prominent.
“Don’t worry,” the speaker writes in response to rising sea levels. However, our worry is misdirected at cockroaches, and not at ourselves. Hinting at our apathy toward the horrors of climate change, the speaker highlights everything we do not possess but cockroaches do: a “fuck-you, will-to-thrive,/ there-are-too-many-of-us/ attitude”. The entomologist Tim Kring concludes, "Let's put it this way — they’re [cockroaches are] with us forever”. So are the consequences of our actions. These cockroaches are only with us “forever” as long as we are around to imagine a “forever”.
Lim Xin Hwee has a keen interest in language and how people use it. A member of the writing collective /s@ber, she has written many things, important and unimportant. She graduated from NTU with a degree in English and Linguistics.
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