Enter ghost

Enter occupying army of ghosts

Enter the teeming host of fat and frantic moths obscuring the white orb of the sun

If the sun is a storm I stand at its gate

If the sun is a storm of gasses and moth dust and flame, then the stutter and spray of fire in the sky is a body dispersing, its dust-light

Enter widow’s husband

Widower’s wife

Enter ghost, shuffling, unsettling the dust from the surface of things

I would recognize it by its voice, its whistle, its wheeze, by its favorite vice, by its mossy scent, by the singular thump tap thump of its gait

Would it know me in kind, by the same

The sun cuts a low winter arc

If the sun is the sum of all broken things I am over the moon.

And the breeze stirs the heaps of moth wings on the sill

The moths too have been spent by their fervor and lust

I am young and wild

I am older and quieter

If I am neither me nor I

I am lost

I am lost in the noise:

the human hum, in the buzz of the hive, the scent of moss on the wind

Enter wind, its twisting blade, the low winter sun, the tattered, stirring, dusty songs

—Genya Turovskaya

Ode to the Moth

Moths swarm

a Brugmansia shrub

in the garden. It’s spring. They kiss

its flowers—pendulous, trumpet-shaped,

toxic—which seems stupid,

though haven’t these exact

moths thumped and thumped

against my porch light, its bright shell,

every night for weeks now?

And to accomplish what?

They could be from a different time entirely.

Someone tills the ground.

Someone tips the watering can.

Sugar cane. Corn stalk. Soon

everything stripped, that strange

old utterance. (How

then to sweeten the tongue?)

I think I’m just lonely.

When last I smelled this

smell, it was a bar of soap,

unopened, in your bathroom.

You said its fragrance

clings to your skin all day.

So I pressed it to my face.

—Nathan McClain

—TC Tolbert

And I believe that the grasshoppers chirruping after their manner in the heat of the sun over our heads are talking to one another and looking down at us. What would they say if they saw that we, like the many, are not conversing, but slumbering at mid-day, lulled by their voices, too indolent to think? Would they not have a right to laugh at us?

—Socrates, in Plato’s Phaedrus, translated by Benjamin Jowett

—Megan Fernandes

Small Print

click click click

camera shutters, scut

climb the look out;

up quark, down quark;

people are two strokes,

so is ten – tell me f(x)

spiders remind her of her mother,

seventh leg stroking,

calming the edible, insecure

stay

still,

very

very

still

chinese characters:

picturesque fission – when

they collide, worlds;

uncentered,

what is a quark made of?

thoraxic discontinuity, like how

many steps between zero and one;

tri-sectioned, you say, which

do I eat first?

and the set of all sets?

self-unconscious mechanicality;

heart: an exoskeleton

carrying what?

ex-

cept

for

en

bloc

field is conveniently segmented;

self-unconscious compartment-

alization, hid in exoskeleton;

synecdochic, you say, which

do I eat last?

selfies don’t make a sound

– mute the click;

one picture, ten bodies,

return to cricket-quieted night;

are we really giants after all?

speak up, static talk

purple noon-glow

nuclear kaleidoscope

self-unconscious discretion

picture picture picture

and in between quarks?

aortic meter, insecare

—Czander Tan

If sages, saints, and prophets exist, if scholar and poets [...] and insects exist, it is because their names are found in the book.

—Edmond Jabes

The praying mantis easily elides suspicion by folding into an orchid to yield aggression. The brimstone butterfly closes its wings to avoid it. Lore has it. There are many mantids but it’s a gesture we call out. Butterfly came from brimstone, and so becoming a leaf in life it becomes every other kind of itself in language. Etched onto the back of a non-circulating coin it only appears to have landed on what passes for money, reminiscent of both but being neither. Gershom Sholem talks about mystics seeing god but only encountering some reflection of themselves. And what can you do with a thing like that? Having never seen god nor myself, believing in either. Some turn to praying. He was hired when someone thought him a botanist. Who knows this is where the game ends and Gershom Scholem elides into Golem. Lore has it Jabes walked in ever-widening circles around the Jardin des Champs Elysees until he became the city. And then what? An ellipsis crawls inside an omission. Repetition is an insect. Enough time passes that you can say to time, enough. Enough lavender is brushed by your hand that you can say, lavender. Anything at all.

—Oren Silverman

my kids got scared of a

cartoon ladybug on tv yesterday.

one hid behind the

couch and one hid behind me.

—Julie Doxsee