Ants.
Two weeks in L.A.
New home smells of cat vomit and urine.
Four days driving for this
I remind myself.
New roommate
That obese kind of mid-40s
cancer survivor
obese
just found God.
The smell.
Permeates nostrils the lingering and you cannot lose it.
Spent four days on knees scrubbing brown tile eggshell white.
Spent four days building my triceps with vacuum pushes
and his bedroom remains.
That obese kind of mid-40s
Spiderman obsessive
on bumpers
on t-shirts
on shelfs action-figured.
His bedroom remains.
Oversized white underwear strewn about comic book boxes, weeks old cat food reeking and rotting in Gladware containers.
His cat has defected to my bedroom.
Ants. They crawled unison through the window screen
Through cracks in the drywall near the sill
Hidden in the closet and ran upon my slow-leaking air mattress.
Hundreds. Thousands.
I took to them with paper towel anger and smashed.
Vacuumed them into canisters
And felt their sad cylindrical confusion
as I fell asleep and woke at 4 A.M. on the floor.
