Madeleine Marie Slavick - USA

Spare the red and orange terror of a centipede, or the sadness of a moth, and what about the great cicada tragedy, does it, just once a year, deafen the trillions of ants and bees on duty. Mosquito, mosquito, how your sound must tire your geometry body drawn in hair while bushy caterpillars wrap nets around the crabapple or spread ghost carpets along shores skimmed by specks so small to be nameless, but when a flying ant falls, now wingless, it worms a new life into any crevice as the butterfly lives its myth in a fizz, this leaf, that branch, all this air around to twitch in, or are you flirting. Gnats gather in random clouds above us and unloved flies home in on the indefensible warmth of cow ears, horse noses. Oh little ladybug, rounded ladybird, are you the optimist we have wanted you to be, because the touched grey millipede curls so quickly into a still fossil, remembering nothing but fear and itself.