Betsy Andrews
1
Midday. Newshour. White-tailed skimmers loiter over the parking-lot potholes,
citrus thrips plunder the groves. Elsewhere the glittering demoiselle, elsewhere the humped knobtail,
the Cyprian plump bush-cricket clinging to rock-rose fingers, calling across the cow fields
to absolutely no one. Elsewhere the seedpod shieldback, elsewhere the fabulous green sphinx moth
battering the all-night furious lights at the world’s largest missile base. Cloud copper, Vogel’s blue,
Comoro friar. The two-spotted threadtail that lives in the rivulets where backhoes rumble and chew.
The Southern tailed birdwing, Madeiran brimstone, the Mesopotamian blue are flying feeding
fucking rubbing their fur-mat thighs on their wings, the allegro hum of airborne things,
the presto staccato glue that fuses the summer afternoon’s smashed and shattered
and knee-bruise-gathered puzzlement back together, where wonder isn’t canned like beans,
isn’t shelled by executive privilege. Then poof. They disappear,
our commodity-crop chop-chop-chop an awful abracadabra, the planet sawed screaming in half.
Cameroon sparklewing, ancient greenling, Danish clouded Apollo
pinned to a map of a planet called Lost, while the citrus thrips suck at the lemon blossoms,
and the skimmers dump eggs in a pile of muck, trucks rattling by, caked with lovebugs
who adored the freeway atmosphere, the rank smell of diesel exhaust
2
All of us rotting on tenterhooks for the night when the moon passes out at the wheel,
skids into Earth’s black-concrete shadow, and the earth drops its sober and follows along,
wrapping itself around 200 flag poles, swallowing its tail like a fistful of Adderall,
sparkling sparkling then flaming right out, a burn in the throat like demonic possession,
humanity’s head boiling over and spinning like a top, cursing its feckless parents,
spitting up prop-room green pea soup, its little-girl limbs gone wack-a-doodle,
scratching company logos into its pancake-makeup face.
Such is the pace of our fabric’s unravel. You think it will come in swatches and samples?
Guess again. It will be like fast fashion, petrochemical and ill of fit,
but so cheap-cheap and matchy-matchy that it’s difficult to resist,
in the ultraviolet bug-zapper dusk, a final monumental zzzzt, and all of our wings collapsing,
space junkies jockeying in the petrified lanes of distant broken planets,
wads of useless currency, rubberband-muzzled like smuggled birds,
burning holes in their jumpsuit pockets, fevered as dying stars
Betsy Andrews is author of The Bottom (42 Miles Press, 2014), recipient of the 42 Miles Press Prize in Poetry; and New Jersey (UWisc Press, 2007), winner of the Brittingham Prize. Her chapbooks include She-Devil (Sardines Press, 2004), In Trouble (Boog City, 2004), and Supercollider, with artist Peter Fox. With Keralan poet VK Sreelesh, she co-curates globalpoemic.com, publishing poems witnessing to the times of Covid-19.