The Great Insect Exodus
by Sara Marija Smith
i. We did it in my backyard because
you were embarrassed to be poor and I wasn’t,
because you wouldn’t let me into your home
but it felt good seeing you in mine, because I liked
the vinegar smell of frozen food in the microwave
and you threatened mania when your mother forced
your sister’s old skirts into your closet. All our
clean water was in plastic gallon jugs so we used
Gatorade from the dark warm shelf under
your kitchen sink, gulped down the sizzle and smoke
of expired soda meeting millenia-old minerals and
mulch. When the ants crept up you smeared them
back into the earth; the ladybugs made lacquer
for our nails, the rare centipede squeezed
into mush for mud salads. We engineered
our own makeup, redefined the meaning
of food. We scorched the savory autumnal soil,
swallowed sweet, moldy air and belched out
hot breath and even hotter laughter that seared
the wings off the dragonflies, and when your
fingers touched mine under six inches of soil
I swear to God the bumblebees in my stomach
started stinging and I swear, my lungs flipped
inside out and I swear, my little girl body
ate itself nearly to the bone.
ii. It takes me fourteen years to buy a train ticket home.
My neighbor’s ugly hounds are yelping and the bonfire
down the street is thickening the air and I’m shivering
in the lukewarm light and I inhale hard and long, but
it doesn’t really smell like any of the seasons anymore,
now that the bugs aren’t around to churn up the dirt
and transition the earth between icy lemonade
and steaming tea, allergy and common cold. I see you
at the farmer’s market, your dress the shape and color
of a pill-bug swarm on the sidewalk, my hands
not so much hands but crickets, thumb knuckle sliding
wet against index knuckle, and the song they make
isn’t like anything you or I have ever known.
The cardinals are lepers in a neighborhood without
insects. The little kestrel living in the forty-year beech
emerges to whine at every other eating breathing thing on
the block. The cats are happy hunting rats, you tell me
when we sit down for coffee, but the rats are skinnier and
angrier than they ever were. How many species
do you think we killed? you ask, leaning in tight
like we’re splitting secrets instead of pastries. Your arm
singes a sunlit line down the length of me. I think
your skin is a little glossy in the clementine afternoon,
I think your stretch marks have splashed across
your whole soft body in dark conch shell patterns,
I think there is something skittish in the hunch
of your shoulders and your arms are too thin, too
strong; your exoskeleton is showing. I think
you are more bug than woman. I think
whatever we did to the earth was done right back
to you twentyfold. This time,
when your fingers touch mine on the box
with the sugar packets, you look at me like
I am raw blood-soaked meat. One of us
is eating the other, and in another fourteen years,
it will be the soil consuming us both, sore
and overgrown in our little girl bodies.