A household chore turns into a small moral crisis in Dave Bonta's "Vacuuming the beetles." The speaker finds hundreds of ladybugs clustered in the corners of a room and sucks them up with a vacuum cleaner. He insists the act means nothing. By the last line his own stomach has contradicted him. The poem's central idea is the gap between what we claim to feel and what the body admits, and the way an act we call trivial can still leave a residue.
The opening is almost cheerful. The vacuum's tube is "a magic wand, a reverse rifle," two images that pull in opposite directions. A wand suggests harmless wonder, while a rifle suggests killing. "Reverse" is the clever part, since a gun sends something out and this machine pulls something in. The beetles vanish "with the briefest of rattles," a sound so small it makes the slaughter seem painless. Then the speaker rushes to separate himself from any romance of violence: "This is nothing like hunting, no meditative wait, / no tense silence or rush of adrenaline." The list of what he does not feel is a little too thorough. Someone truly indifferent would not bother to compare himself to a hunter at all.
The poem is in free verse, with no rhyme and no regular meter, and the speech-like lines suit a flat, matter-of-fact tone. The ampersands add to this. They give the page a casual, jotted-down look, as if the speaker were refusing to dress the event up. The enjambment does quiet work too. "Where wall / & ceiling meet" lets the line break fall at the very junction it describes. Near the end, "the body's impulse to rid / itself of itself" breaks its sentence open the way a retch might, and the repeated "itself" turns the phrase back on its own subject.
Around the middle the language lurches upward. The vacuum's noise "cancels out every competing thought," and the speaker reaches for a cosmic comparison: "If there were sound in space, a star / would howl like this when it collapsed into itself." The conditional matters. There is no sound in space, so the star's howl is imaginary, and the grand image reads as the mind inflating a small event to give it weight, or perhaps to hide from it. Immediately the poem punctures its own grandeur with the dry, almost bureaucratic line "detritus from the ceiling, meet the detritus from the floor." The insects are now demoted to dust, introduced to their new neighbors like guests at a very bad party.
Yet the poem cannot stay cold. "Bright clot of color, flame" is the one tender moment, a brief address to the dying beetles. "Clot" is a bodily word, and "flame" prepares the verb in the next line, "here's a sackful of dust in which to gutter," where the beetles flicker out like candles. The vacuum has also acquired a "throat," so the machine is quietly given a body, and the room starts to feel like a living thing being cleaned out.
The turn comes with the smell. The "acrid stench of alarm pheromones" is the beetles' own chemical protest, and it "grows stronger & stronger" while the speaker's numbness weakens in step. His nausea is called "the body's impulse to rid / itself of itself," and the final line, "starting with the most recent foreign matter," leaves an unsettling ambiguity. The foreign matter may be the stench he has breathed in. It may also be the beetles themselves, or by extension the speaker, who is as much an intruder in the natural cycle as they were in his house. The sentence trails off without comfort, and the poem stops where the sickness begins.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal of easy answers. It does not scold the speaker for killing pests, and it does not sentimentalize insects. It simply notices that a person who says "I feel nothing" is often reporting a hope rather than a fact. The body, here, is the more honest witness.