After the Nuclear Holocaust

Only cockroaches are left.

Cockroaches on top of cockroaches.

They wriggle,
copulate,
spread.

Mother cockroaches
scrape against rocks,
gash their exoskeletons,
releasing black inner fluids.

The mothers feel no pain-
They are animals.

Soft pink mouths of the young
arrive and open to receive the
mother cockroaches’ bloodmilk.

The next generation is taller, harder.

And eventually,
(shortly after sunrise
when the sky
is a soft eggshell blue,
when pure white whispers of clouds
slowly ascend,
and the whole world
smells like progress, and good fortune)
one morning in a laboratory,
the cockroaches invent themselves souls.