Traps
Baltimore
1978
The only thing we talked about were the cockroaches of Baltimore. Cockroaches began showing up in the poems and stories being considered in the seminars. The program was only one year. Not even a year, really, but the nine months, the school year. Not even nine months as the thesis had to be finished by February so it could be typed and formatted perfectly. We talked more about cockroaches than we did about our poems it seemed. Once, I opened a cupboard door and the back of the door came alive, a swarm of cockroaches. Elizabeth Spires was from Circleville, Ohio, famous for its pumpkins. Her father was an exterminator. She knew about cockroaches, and her father sent new glue traps. You could look inside and see the long antennae of the mired insect waving slowly back and forth. Beth was the only one of us that had a new IBM Selectric typewriter. It had a tiny memory that allowed the machine to erase a mistake. We talked about the cockroaches in Beth’s traps and her typewriter.