I Have Something to Say

Confession: I don’t like other stutterers.
I don’t like to be reminded
of the wasp between my lips.
I don’t enjoy this clumsy game of figuring out
who’s going to fumble the first vowel
at the goal line of tongue and mouth.

It will be me, inevitably,
fucking up the words in poems

like circumlocution or Orusoidea,
which is just a learned name
for a group of parasitic wasps
that lay their eggs inside
the mouths of caterpillars,

which are really just
unlucky furry things if you ask me,
minding their own damn business
munching on cabbage leaves.

The wasp larvae will eventually
devour them from the inside
and hatch in a moment that
some incorrectly consider beautiful.

What’s beautiful
is that a mud dauber queen
carried one single mud morsel at a time
in her small and vicious mouth
to build her nest,

and all this so her babies would grow
to the size of school erasers
and ruin our weekly flag football games,

where Billy would assert that wasps
were indeed the worst things ever birthed
through lips swollen and red as ripe chokeberries.

This is just to say
everything I can only say
with a mouthful of river stones,

that I like it when people finish my sentences
but sometimes I feel like the caterpillar
with an ovipositor down its throat.

This is just to say that you
can feel bad for the caterpillar, too,
but must remember the voiceless joy
of the cabbage leaf left uneaten.

Eddie Krzeminski (@EddieKrze) received his MFA from Florida International University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Grist, Sinking City, Small Orange, and elsewhere. He teaches writing classes in Southwest Florida.

Poetry Contest Second Runner-Up