Time crawls slowly when you are in a rush to get out of work or away from dumb questions. A shiny black cockroach crawls too and rushes under the refrigerator when the light is turned on. Insects can make a grown person scream and itch and stay awake. Insomnia affects the memory. I have an old memory of standing in the kitchen, watching dust particles dance in beams of sunlight. It was oddly beautiful. A black pearl shines in the light of the day and is beautiful in its uniqueness. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And all clichés have a ring of truth. Diamonds are not this girl’s best friend, though. They are as unappealing as the twitching form of a crushed roach left on the sidewalk. Water is clear, transparent, unless it is flowing down the street drains carrying dead insects and dirt or swelling in rivers. Blood runs thick and red. Roses are fragrant. My grandmother wore the subtle fragrance of roses for all the years I knew her. Time expired on her life and the years I thought we still had together jetted away from me, like a roach escaping a stomping boot.
- K. De Melo.
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I really enjoyed reading this response. The speaker's tone in the poem is both nostalgic and unapologetic. The imagery is startling with the references to insects and beautiful with the traces of "black pearl"/"water"/"roses" dispersed throughout.
ReplyDeleteYours is better than mine. Straight up. Nice work, you captured the sentence movement really well. The image of the cockroach throughout the piece is beautiful. Time, too, is beautiful, but scary-- but again, you say it best here.
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A lot that stuck with me in this was the way you managed to take a lot of pretty cliched imagery and twist it around so that it conveyed something more intimate like how the smell of roses instead remind you of a family member instead of some lost lover.
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