Pest Control

I couldn't tell you how many I killed

It’s safe to say around twenty.

Broken, smashed, twitching remains

of which I assure you there are plenty.

Much like the head of a hydra

a small death was replaced by five.
A frantic, chaotic call to arms

for the glory of the hive.

My people backed away in fear

“He has this, a willing killer of the drones.”

What humor that I should bolster their resolve    

and yet no one inquired into my own.

I have an intense fear of them,

I’m not as brave as I seem.

A thousand yard stare an appropriate mask

over my heart’s desire to scream.

Faux Pas

We recently hired a young Bosnian woman at my work, bringing our number of that nationality up to two.  My two Bosnian coworkers, both women, quickly made friends with each other and joked that now they would be able to speak ill of the rest of the staff in their native tongue.  I have a fear of being in any situation where I don’t know what is being said or talked about, so I took it upon myself to learn a few Bosnian phrases purely out of interest.  “What harm could a few conversational phrases in another language do?”  I asked myself, ignoring my inner voice of reason that replied:  “The harm is that you’re already teaching yourself four languages.”

In my defense (and not a very good one), the language learning app “Duolingo” makes a fun and easy game of learning languages, but I digress.

I began to learn a few starting conversational phrases in Bosnian via “Google Translate” and confirmed my pronunciations with Bosnian number one.  After the beta phase of Bosnian phrases, it was time to test what I’ve learned on Bosnian number two.

My pronunciations are weak but not nearly as bad as my cultural insensitivity.  It turns out that I had been speaking the Serbian-Bosnian dialect (can you guess which side of the conflict she was from?), a misstep I would discover when reading the body language of the new girl and the Wikipedia article on the Bosnian War.  Dreadfully embarrassed, I later apologized to her for putting my foot in my mouth.
“Lets just stick with the four languages we’re working on for now.”  My inner voice of reason chimed in again.