Ash-brown tatters lofted on pheromones,
gypsy moths flutter among boughs and across the meadow
like confetti. Beyond hunger. Only sex
drives the males. The females wait
folded within crevices in bark. They’ve lost their mouths.
Admirable to be so single-minded.
Just days ago, as creepy adolescents
they chewed the branches bare, littered the path
with skeleton leaf-stalks, tore new craters
out of the canopy so the sky fell through:
we, too, could strip a forest, strip
a continent, but not so lacily.
The lanyard on our neighbor’s flagpole clanks
in the wind, the fraying stars and stripes
fluster and droop. The lime-green
katydid impersonates a folded leaf
pressed to the maple trunk, chiding, rasping,
preparing to mate and chew. Along the road
wild Sweet William and purple chicory
festoon derelict beer cans and vodka bottles in the ditch.
We have everything we need, but we want more,
and faster. The crushed garter snake
is scrawled on the tarmac in an ampersand.
This poem appears in the October 2025 print edition.
