Gregor Samsa in Reverse by Andre F. Peltier

Every morning is the same 
for the heroic dung beetle. 
Every morning he awakens 
to search for that ever-loving 
fecal matter. 
His food, his home, his burrow, 
the dung beetle knows 
tomorrow will be the same. 
Tomorrow is always the same. 
Tomorrow will never change. 
He rolls his dung down, down, down
to his wife and kids. 
He rolls that holy scat 
to save his holy soul. 
The dung beetle lives on 
every continent of the Earth 
save Antarctica. 
The dung beetle can bury 
250 times its own weight 
in poop every night. 
The dung beetle has been rolling 
his dung since time immemorial. 
The first fossil evidence of the dung beetle 
finds him in the Middle Cretaceous Period. 
He rolled the droppings 
of Velociraptor, Utahraptor, T. Rex. 
He saluted the Tarbosaur 
each morning by the stream, 
the river, the boggy deathtraps. 
For 36 billion mornings, 
the dung beetle has cleaned, eaten 
and bred in our refuse. 

Let’s consider one particular dung beetle. 
We’ll call him Gregor 
for the sake of poetry, 
for the sake of literary history, 
for the sake of intertextuality. 
One morning, Gregor awoke feeling 
different. 
A sense of ennui had overtaken 
his usually sunny demeanor. 
Things seemed off. 
He had grown while sleeping. 
Bigger than his friends and colleagues, 
larger than his ancestors, 
Gregor barely fit in his burrow. 
He stretched his unusually long limbs 
and his feet dangled off of his bed. 
His head bonked the ceiling 
of his little hovel. 
Another day passed and he knew 
strange things were afoot. 
“We’re not in Kansas anymore,” 
he said to his faithful dog Toto. 
Gregor had grown to be nearly 
six feet tall. 
His middle tibia had fallen away. 
His hind tibia, thicker, full of muscle. 
Suddenly he realized his endoskeleton. 
The first beetle ever to grow bones. 
“What are these calcium rich rods 
within my body?” he asked himself. 
“What the lens and cornea?” 
No longer using moonlight polarization, 
Gregor suddenly saw color, depth, 
the world more than an inch away. 

And what a sight it was. 
“What did Gregor spy?” 
you may be asking yourself. 
“Whatever could a former dung beetle 
make of modernity?” 
Gregor flexing his human jaw, 
expressing air with his human diaphragm, 
uttered his first human words: 
“What a pile of shit!” 
Modern man’s existential quandary, 
his moment in the sun, 
summed up by our simple chum. 
Our detritivorious geotrupid 
with an interesting point. 
Gregor got a job in an office. 
He sat day after day in his cubicle. 
He drank coffee with his coworkers 
and beers at the evening pub. 
He read picture books to 
his little dung beetle kids. 
He made love to 
his little dung beetle wife. 
And so it went. Over and over. 
Until one day, a light bulb over 
his human head, our boy with
his first epiphany: 
“Fuck this!” 
Gregor, with his bipedal human frame, 
his nearly six-foot mass, 
found some ever-loving fecal matter 
and rolled a ball. 
Gregor rolled it home. 
He rolled it up hill and down.
Now, truly human, 
he rolled his ball of dung.

Artist’s Statement

Although I’ve been writing since high school, I only started attempting to publish since the beginning of the pandemic. I tend towards poetry, but even my poems start as prose pieces before I determine line breaks. I am fascinated by the use of nostalgia and the absurd to comment on contemporary culture. While I often tend towards the humorous, my work generally has a socially conscious underbelly concerned with confronting the common ills we face daily. My goal is to make people chuckle while also considering the way we look at our world.

Andre F. Peltier (he/him) is a Pushcart and Best of the Net Nominee and a Lecturer III at Eastern Michigan University where he teaches literature and writing. He lives in Ypsilanti, MI, with his wife and children. His poetry has recently appeared in various publications like CP Quarterly, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Provenance Journal, Lavender and Lime Review, About Place, Novus Review, Fiery Scribe, and Fahmidan Journal, and most recently in Menacing Hedge, The Brazos Review, and Idle Ink. His debut chapbook, Poplandia, is available from Alien Buddha. In his free time, he obsesses over soccer and comic books.