Truth, Lies & Shakespeare Bedbugs

1.
A burning itch jilts me up at 3:00 am
Welts around the waist, wrist, nape
An army of instars, nymphs and bugs
Marching across the bed like warriors
Bellies swollen with my essence
I pinch one down with thumbnail and drag
—a bloody streak of evidence—
Across the snow-white sheet of Oklahoma

2.
Bedbugs choose sex by size
They mate by trauma—
Piercing bellies of male and female
With equal zealous

3.
After three rounds
The Arab, Chinese, African and Mexican
Are weeded out
Only 5 remain
For the prize that could build
A home for the poet from Ramallah
Who doesn’t know his birthday or birthplace
Or the Chinese who writes avant-garde novels
With her rheumatoid hands and murmuring heart

4.
Silvia Beach founded Shakespeare and Company on the left bank of Paris in 1919. It became home for James Joyce, Earnest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Scott Fitzgerald, Mina Loy, and the Beat Generation poets. In 1951, George Whitman took over the bookstore. 30,000 people have slept in the beds tucked between bookshelves. "Be Not Inhospitable to Strangers Lest They Be Angels in Disguise," says the bookstore motto.

5.
The parents started drinking
When children turned 8, 6, 4
More and more frozen pizzas
Hot punches in faces, stomachs
Blackened eyes, collapsed chests
Locked out in Minnesota winter
Call 911. Father knows how
To put on the Professor face
Oldest son shut in Hazelden
Younger ones fled to friends’ homes
Midnight shelters. Winter comes
Like a runaway train…how shall
They cross this frozen sea of lies?

6.
Bedbugs bit me in Paris, San Francisco, and Oklahoma City, all during poetry events. Those cultured, sophisticated, blood-thirsty mother-buggers. They travel far and free for the best: blood, poetry, sex.

7.
The hotel manager hired a bug
Professional to gather evidence of truth
Flashlights, magnifying glass
Stripping sheets, spring box upside down
Groping each crease in the mattress, on the knees
But truth is allusive.
Welts rising like red yeast
Around nape waist wrists face
But who wants to see
A mad woman in the yellow attic?

8.
I visited Paris in 1994 with Lewis Warsh. Our first stop was Shakespeare and Company. George Whitman gave us his own master bed. We crawled in, hearts filled with gratitude. Within 5 minutes, I jumped up, my body covered with crawling things: nymphs, instars, parents, grandparents and great-grandparents of bedbugs.

9.
To see is to believe
Or we see only what we believe?
Under the florescent light
My welts become a scheme

10.
Aristotle believes
Bedbugs can treat snakebites
Ear infections or hysteria

11.
It’s mid 80 F in Oklahoma City
But I’m shivering in the campus museum
Lush with Picasso, Monet, Rembrandt
Bronzed feathers, prayer, blood

12.
Bedbugs love women, pregnant with sweet scent and hot blood. They won’t touch the stressed, the depressed or the manic.

13.
We say we love truth
We claim truth with multi-colored mouths
We think we own truth
As truth slips through clenched sand

14.
“Not fair! Why are they not biting you?” I shouted, brushing 18 generations of bedbugs off my body.

Lewis laughed and laughed in George’s bed. Not a single bug had touched him. “Well, don’t tell me bugs are racists too!” he said.

15.
Truth or lie:
Every human I met in the city
Swears they have at least a quarter Cherokee in their blood

16.
How to kill a bedbug?
DDT, mint, catnips, hemp seeds
Cockroaches, centipedes, spiders, ants
The best award, however, goes to
Assassin Bug a.k.a the Masked Hunter
Hiding in plain sight
With a sting worse than the wasp

17.
I left Paris, face burning with welts, but I couldn’t stop smiling. If Joyce, Pound, Stein and Ginsberg got bitten by the same bugs, does it mean I’m now carrying their blood, their DNA, their truths and lies and genius, through bedbug bites?