Summertime

Ash-brown tatters lofted on pheromones,
gypsy moths flutter amongst boughs and throughout the meadow
like confetti. Past starvation. Solely intercourse
drives the males. The females wait
folded inside crevices in bark. They’ve misplaced their mouths.
Admirable to be so single-minded.
Simply days in the past, as creepy adolescents
they chewed the branches naked, littered the trail
with skeleton leaf-stalks, tore new craters
out of the cover so the sky fell by:
we, too, might strip a forest, strip
a continent, however not so lacily.
The lanyard on our neighbor’s flagpole clanks
within 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,
getting ready to mate and chew. Alongside the highway
wild Candy William and purple chicory
festoon derelict beer cans and vodka bottles within the ditch.
We have now the whole lot we’d like, however we wish extra,
and quicker. The crushed garter snake
is scrawled on the tarmac in an ampersand.This poem seems within the October 2025 print version.