By M. Cynthia Cheung
Last August’s shed insect cases
A litter scattered and heaped
Between the fence and compost barrels
Beneath them, a thousand new grub generations
The dry click of their jaws as they pulled meat
Off bones, rolled wet peels through their guts
The swarm squirming over
A half-chicken carcass or a sack of salmon bones
No muscle fascicle left untransformed
Soft corpulent larval bodies
In segments, shadow of the sickening
Rhythmic twitch, their muttered twirl
Disintegrating our carefully made-up lines
Our heave of dim-witted couplings—how often
We pretended a commonplace lust could be enough
Repeated in close quarters over and over
Until a humming cloud glittered up darkly
From the trash heap, the fish and the fowl
All our discards that rode off in the stomachs of flies
M. Cynthia Cheung is a practicing physician in the United States who also writes poetry.
