Not a Silverfish by Bao Phi

From his novel "Thousand Star Hotel" - I recommend all his poems.

Written in 2017.

A large centipede was in my tub for days.
It looked like a prehistoric zipper made of needles.
A firecracker with too many fuses.
I skipped taking a shower for far too long—
an unspoken compromise—hoping
it would disappear on its own,
preferring to be dirty over drowning my fear.
Eventually I trapped it in a container,
took it outside while it scrambled
like an explosion of exclamation points
in the foggy plastic,
and let it go.
These centipedes are often mistaken for silverfish—
they actually make dinner of them and other more damaging pests.

I know what it's like to be mistaken for something else,
to feel that the first reaction when a new set of eyes encounters your body
is to want to smash you.
To wonder what in history made a caterpillar a caterpillar
a ladybug a ladybug.
To know what it's like to be invisible until revealed to be ugly,
alien thing, hairy wiggle
whose body tells the only story
anyone is willing to hear.
When it shook free of my trap,
its head made of stepladders,
its body a spasm of a hundred loose threads of fate,
it didn't make a sound but I swear
I could hear it scream that it wanted
to travel to prehistory
and rewrite the many veins of possibility
that would shape how it would be seen
so that the present could be a place
where it could be
understood for what
it was.