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.

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