Prompt Entry 4

Periplaneta americana.

Let us begin with a little etymology:

Peri-, prefix meaning "around, about, enclosing." Comes from the Greek "peri-" meaning "around, about, beyond."

Planeta- a word that does not exist in modern usage, it is Latin with its origin in the Greek phrase asteres planetai, "wandering stars." Planetai is further traced back to planesthai, "to wander."

Americana, logically, means "American."

A name is an entryway. A name can contain some sense of a thing but never encompasses it wholly. A name is a place to start.


The first time I saw a cockroach, I was laying on Sarah Hyder's grandma's bed in Punta Gorda, Florida, on my way to college spring break in Daytona. Oma had forewarned us. Sort of.

"Oeh, thzey are evrewhzere, thze Palmettoze. Looke ouht."

Sarah, Liz and I got the master suite. Oma, a traditional, German hostess, refused to stay in her own room and chose the smaller guest bedroom. We were drinking cheap rum mixed with orange juice when Liz screamed.

"(Unintelligible, loud hysteria)!!!"

Sarah and I whipped our heads around. She spotted it seconds before I did and began to laugh. I leaped back.

On the middle of the creamy beige wall, a brown monstrosity hung motionless. It was the size and shape of an overlong almond. Even from my position cowering in the back of the room, I could see its segmented body and antennae.

"You two are ridiculous. It's just a palmetto." Sarah chided us as she rolled up a magazine for the kill.

"That. Is. A. Cockroach." Liz gasped.

"Duh. They're basically the same thing." Sarah struck and missed. A dreadful thing happened.

"(Angry, unintelligible hysteria)!!! IT CAN FLY!!!!!!!" Liz brought a pillow to her face and yelled into it. Sarah jumped from the bed to the ground. It happened quickly. SLAP! Squish...

"Yeah," Sarah whipped her hair back and stood. "They can do that."

When I saw them in movies, cockroaches indicated filth. The man with the cockroach infestation was the creep, the killer, the hobo. The protagonist reflected on scuttling cockroaches in his childhood home, safe in the spotless residence of his adulthood.

In Savannah, the palmettos were everywhere. I came to the conclusion that southerners couldn't shed the plague of the roaches so they shed the name. A palmetto could be beautiful if you let it.

A cockroach can travel up to 50 times its body length in a second. That's the equivalent of a human being running 330 miles per hour. As it is, it's about 3.4 mph, or a leisurely walking pace for Homo sapiens. The roaches accompanied me as I walked to and from work. At first, I went to great lengths to avoid them. If I saw a roach, I jumped into the street and jogged a few paces before returning to the sidewalk. Roaches. They disgusted me. I feared their entry into my home, armed my apartment with traps to insure their demise. When they scuttled alongside me, I imagined I could hear the clickity clack of their multiple legs. They darted between my feet unexpectedly. I was sure this was an attempt at torture. Shiny brown bodies blended with the fallen leaves of live oak trees, providing the perfect cover for the infestation.

After weeks, months of journeying with them, I lost my fear of the roach. I conceded defeat and began addressing them as palmettos. When they showed up in my path, I shared it. They, after all, had been there first.

Periplaneta americana, the American cockroach, the palmetto bug. Despite their species name, the palmetto isn't even American. Palmettos came to the states from Africa during the slave trade. The southerners renamed the slaves too. P. americana sought out the warmest, moistest climates, the ones reminiscent of Mother Africa. They have been unjustly labeled a household pest. Cockroaches will do almost anything to avoid a human home. They want to live out of doors beneath the stars.

All around the planet. Wandering around, looking for stars.

Place Entry 4

5:45 pm

the corner of my street (metro Detroit)

The absence of critters made sense last week and the week before and the week before and the week before when the weather was below freezing, below livable.

But today it is beautiful: 52 degrees, pink-skyed and fresh. Still, not an animal stirs.

A car whizzes by, threatening me with spray from its tires. The potholes have worsened, and I suspect the animals know to avoid bustling intersections. They move covertly, take side streets, like drunks at closing time. I breathe deeply. The air is wet and the sidewalk sopping with mud. The snow has melted, save foot high piles where the plows were, stubborn reminders of a season that hasn't finished.

But I have finished. I have finished with metro Detroit-- for now, at least. Tomorrow I will be on I-75, winding through the Smokies to the end of the Appalachian trail 'til I reach the ATL. Back to Georgia. Back to the heat, the peaches and the southern slang. A new city to claim. A new self to invent.

Walking down the road to my home- my mother's home, I ought to say- I look up at the barren trees. Melting snow and humidity has rendered them inky black. They are stark against the coral sky. There is no wind, and I can feel them breathe with me. They are expectant, sensing spring in the unseasonable heat. They don't care I am abandoning them.

The ground is mostly mud with sparse tufts of green grass. I imagine there are earthworms wriggling just beneath the surface. They are nearly ready to see the sun.

Prompt Entry 3

I grew up fat. Not baby-fat, middle-school-extra-10-pounds fat. Fat. Morbidly obese fat. For real.

Savannah, Georgia is 10 minutes from the ocean. A certified aqua-phile, I am spending my only day off at the beach. Jaimie and I scamper through sand so hot it's threatening to become glass below our feet. The mid-morning sun is climbing to the east. The sky is cerulean and cloudless. The Atlantic drums the shore. A few other die-hards are on the beach, but at 93 degrees and climbing, it's too hot for most people. Not us. We throw our towels into the wind, wrestle them to the ground and lay down.

I'm stiff. Knowledge of my bare limbs, my stomach swarthed in skin-tight fabric overshadows my consciousness of the fact no one is looking at me. I do not relax my body. The sun pulsates.


In college I started eating well and exercising. By my junior year I had lost 65 pounds and began seeing my first boyfriend. He cared deeply for me. I loved the fact that he seemed to think I was beautiful, that he held and kissed me sincerely.
"Just relax!" He feigned exasperation, kissing me as we embraced.
"What do you mean?"
"You're always so tense," he stroked my back and hair, "I just want you to be comfortable."


The tide is coming in. Jaimie and I have returned to our towels after spending a half-hour in the salty sea. This time of year, it is impossible to lay on the beach for more than an hour. At that point, heat stroke becomes a risk. I snuggle into my towel, salty and wet. Seagulls caw above me, hoping Jaimie and I have packed snacks for them to scavenge. The gulls flap away; they must have spotted something interesting down the shore. Their absence is the silence of a snooze alarm and the crashing waves, the hollow of deep sleep. I breathe in. Exhale. I breathe more deeply, consciously mimicking the waves.

Our bodies pulsate as waves. On the shore of the ocean, our internal rhythm has found a harmony part in the ever-crashing sea. As internal and external begin to coalesce, our consciousness seeps out of our bodies into the sand, pulsates into the sky. We become soft and heavy and relax fully, completely. We lose anxiety, fear. We simply are.


"This is my favorite part," I barely hear him, I'm so far away. He holds me tighter. "When you fall asleep and finally relax."

Place Entry 3

4:42 am
The corner of my street (suburban Detroit)

It's four am and I am numb three steps outside of my door. This process began in the garage. Someone else might have waited til morning for this activity but I am compelled to write. Right now. I exist an awful lot at four am: obsessing, inebriated, the machine of my brain combusting. Right now, I want to write. I am going outside to exist in my place whether it is -3 degrees or not.

There is nothing happening- nothing- as I start down the street. Not a branch moves beneath a bounding bird. Not a cat skulks. No human stirs. One car passes. Just one. The streetlight emits a deafening hum as I stand beneath it. My corner has been frostbitten for a week. All water has become ice. The purple-orange of the night sky makes dust of the rime, dulling daytime's white sparkles to a dingy, gleaming brown. Even the thick snow is blanketed with frost. Everything appears glittery/drab beneath the dust/frost. Cold has crystallized us all, imprisoned us in ice and slowly carved us back out. I have only just begun to regain my motor skills, the effort to walk myself is a great success.

This is one of those nights where everything seems a coincidence and I am struck with the awe-inspiring and cruel re-realization that I am the great star of my life as well as the butt of the joke. This is funny to me-- the fact that I never know where I am or what is going on because I'm always, always in motion. Next week I'll be on a street corner 600 miles away and that is what's happening. The turn has been made and I'm making the turn. It has passed. It is coming.

It is too cold to stand out here 20 minutes- I walk back toward my house after 10. Everything is frozen: cold, quiet, still. I move.