Failure

I failed to submit this to the Consilience journal for poems about science for their issue on Failure.

Sorry cicada

I was a kid

I didn’t know what you were

I thought you were dead

I tried to pick you off the sidewalk by one of your wings

When you buzzed

So I stomped on you.

Sorry dragonfly

I was a teen

I was with my brothers in a field at a campground

I swatted you accidentally on purpose while playing badminton

I couldn’t figure out what you were even with my new insect ID book

When I realized

You no longer had a head.

Sorry cockroach

I was an adult

I had moved to my ancestral country

I was living on my own for the first time

I was about to go to bed on the first night in my new old place

When you scuttled onto the pristine white sliding door

So I smacked you with the sole of a slipper

And you left a stain on my no longer pristine white sliding door.

Sorry

I failed to appreciate your wonderosity.

When I was in university I met a physics guy who,

when I told him I was a zoologist,

said, “Oh, you kill things.”

And he wasn’t wrong.