I used to live up north, in the city, where cockroaches were a sallow gray-brown, slimmer than your ear canal, traveled in large family packs, and determined to find the food hidden in everything. As some of you know quite well, I imagine, in the humid southern US states, the native cockroaches are glossy and mahogany in color, approaching the size of your thumb, living largely solitary lives, mostly outdoors, like any honorable, self-respecting insect. Some even prefer the pretty, vegetal moniker, Palmetto. Even so, they do come in. Also, they fly when frightened. When you crush them with your shoe or hand, as you learn to do fairly quickly — shedding the squeamish devise of the rolled newspaper, the rolling of which takes far too long — you will hear a distinctly audible crunch, like biting into a kernel of popped caramel popcorn. You must also expect the squirt, about which the less said the better. Hands can always be washed, of course.

It is said, I've heard, that there are places where both kinds of cockroaches are encountered. People who live in those places have little time for prose poems.