LISA WILLIAMS

To an Exterminator

Because civilization is always
a retort to another’s guts—

Remove the hive. It is in
the wrong place, nestled and humming
as if error could become a home.
It needs your corrective violence.

For the hive attached to neglect,
built up in a lax, sodden spring
in which no one was looking. Come topple
its walls, knock its symmetry’s
struts. There are ways
to make disaster a part of our world.

(If the hive let us know it was coming.
If the hive had foreshadowed regret.
If the hive had not such dripping valor

that destroyed what it met.) We need morning
swept free, as the drones clear the hive
of a hive’s fine, antennaed
debris. Knock the posts
of its progress to dirt so we see what exists
now does not. Craft a lock
for the mind. Leave no sign
of vacancy.