My body metabolizes stress as dreams about bed bugs. 
Indoor space is a biome scientists are still learning how to know.
I flip bedsheets inside out 
and exclude you from the poem. 

After camp, my grandmother hoarded every thing. 
This new branch of urban ecology reproduces in built structures.
A professor advised me once to fall in love. 
A cell changes over time.

Each time I’m touched 
like peeping through my skin is clear domicile.
I know homemaking is a weapon.
Silverfish aren’t fish. Too                       alive at the gut.

My friend asks me what I think of minimalism. 
My grandmother picked horse lice out of my uncle Yoshio’s hair                        a holding.
I’ve been tempted by the idea of empty space. 
I lock myself up at night since then.

Human houses are only a subset of the indoor biome, not including animal stalls. 
The indoor biome is suited for citizen science. 
My grandmother used to live here. 
We inhabit each other, a definition of affect I’m trying on for myself. 

I read the flora and fauna in my home as uncannily resilient. 
My ancestors’ bodies were presciently small.
Nests accommodate the needs of infestation. 
I simply could not live in this house alone. 

Even minimally, after disrepair, my body is built of course.
A cell changes over time. 
Arthropods have been domesticated, we didn’t know, flattening themselves to the home. 
I’m learning how to name a space I wish was empty.

My now partner does not laugh at me peeling my skin at a swarm in our house.
There is a minimalism to keeping my self inside.
A hoard reproduces itself along a family line, diverging form and association.
A cell changes over time.

I want to exclude you from the poem.
The house is crawling.
Bedsheets might be a dried expanse.
Empty space, the unseen        within and beneath the home, must be cared for – stands in relation, if abhorred.

I hoard myself a swarm.
The ecosystem of my house requires the materiality of my living.
I am as fruitful as I am indebted.
My grandma used to live here.

I still can’t stand my own un-empty sound.
A single organism working isn’t a house alive.
Evolution happens to me.
As if                                                                     that is love.

My grandma is a swarm.
I love a swarm.
I could be a biome.
Indeed, I am.