Overcast and cool, with lower humidity at last. Still, the world gets much too close: mosquito in my ear, deer tick traversing my laptop.
mosquito
Silver-spotted skippers work the last dame’s-rocket, and a day-time cricket begins to chirp. I slap myself in the chest to kill a mosquito.
The clack of acorns hitting branches on their way to the ground. I’m beating myself up trying to kill a mosquito reconnoitering my torso.
In the steady rain, the cheerful bickering of goldfinches. A mosquito brushes against the hair on my arm, looking for a clear way in.
A mantis clings upside-down to a porch column. I wave a mosquito in its direction, and it turns its head to watch the ungainly craft fly by.
While a question mark butterfly mines the pores of my index finger for salt, a mosquito lands on my ring finger and sinks her own probe.
Cloud-to-cloud lightning, thunder like a cloth being torn. Downpour. We’ll remember 2011 for years: “That was the autumn of the mosquitoes.”
A mosquito’s thin song in my ear. I wave her away, then watch as she and another tangle, part, and settle upside-down on the white ceiling.
A mottle-winged moth flops like a fish across the floor. A mosquito tries to drill through denim, her hind-most legs like levers going up.
Dawn finds the walking onions still as trolls, except for a slight swaying—no doubt the wind. A mosquito bite swells between my knuckles.
Halfway up the hill, a yellow-billed cuckoo is calling over and over, that lyrical coo turning mechanical, relentless. Mosquito in my ear.
A mosquito creeps across my shirt, an inchworm measures my jeans, and a hummingbird circles my head: this morning, I’m doomed to disappoint.
High, deliberate notes of a blue-headed vireo: April revisited. A slow floodwater mosquito dies between the heels of my palms.