Bug a-bed

Sravya Darbhamulla

CN: Bed bugs, OCD

The ritual of the city to let the latch
To measure in exact 
a night's meal

Leave one to the 
Attentions - the vile anointments of
Pretty nymphs swollen red 
Fed on three capillaries, 
In the trisected night I delirious 
Am aqua vitae 
My bloodletting milk to an apple-seed fallen from Eve's apple 
Bedborne in the very cradles of civilisation
Meenakshi supine and stymied 
Bitten by urban mythos and watchful of 
Fevers transmitted like facts 
Is this the prettiest thing parasitic? 
Me, bursting in blood, ripe
Me, craven, thirsty
Fear the crawling of time under my skin and in 
Soft sibilant shadows 
Chime chimera cimex cimetry symmetry
The ancient inevitability of the prey 
Protocol  
The administration of the anesthesia and the ambrosia 
The rightful rent
The fallacy of comforters
In the sweet-sour spice of  
Naphthalene - can I not choose my
One lie?

The Science

This poem alludes to the psychological impacts of living through an infestation of bed-bugs (Cimex lectularius), a sort of suspended nightmarish and feverish paranoia, which led to a cleaning obsession for me but may in severe cases escalate to compulsive behaviours and delusional parasitosis. Bites are often not immediately recognised due to anesthetic and anticoagulant properties in proteins injected into the victim, and feeding is, anecdotally, done via a three-fold cluster of bites termed ‘breakfast-lunch-dinner.’ The creature, by injecting the anticoagulant, keeps the blood from coagulating and defeats the body’s protective instinct to clot so that it can continue feeding. I draw a parallel to Meenakshi, a mythic figure who is born with three breasts and is told she will lose one when she meets her consort, to try to confer meaning to this episode, and also frame myself as a nurturer of the bedbug. These metaphors are intended to evoke the unsettling, othering quality of this experience and some sense of betrayal of the promise of ‘civilisation’. This hemophagic (i.e. blood-consuming) creature has co-evolved with humans and accompanies ‘civilisation’ from the cradle to the bedspread. 

All the words in the line '‘Chime chimera cimex cimetry symmetry’ start with sibilant sounds, so I’m trying to evoke an uncomfortably soft sound like the rustling of a bedspread; along with keywords that my brain plays with – the chime of a doorbell, the chimeric nature of a safe space like the bed, cimex is the scientific name of the bed bug; cimetry as a misspelling / perversion of the cemetery or the grave (to parallel mentions of the cradle) and symmetry –life-death, feeder-fed upon, renter-landlord. The last few lines are a personal note - Naphthalene is the main component of mothballs, which are poisonous to humans but can’t keep bedbugs away. I tried to combat my anxiety with them but I was only harming myself. 

The Poet

Sravya Darbhamulla is an Indian translator, writer and poet with a background in law and linguistics. She has previously worked as an archivist for the Archives at NCBS, a contemporary science history archives, where she started an institutional newsletter called the Silverfish. She has written reviews of literature intermediate between science and art for the British Society for Literature and Science and is interested in chemistry, geology, lepidopterology and all manner of interdisciplinary explorations.

Next poem: Canto de grillos by Marisa López Soria