-for The Great Southern Brood XIX, Georgia 2024

They came like floodwaters—not soft, not slow,

but sudden, cracking the ground with hunger,

lifting themselves from the dark into the blaze.

Their shells clung to everything: hydrangea, mailbox,

porch post, a girl’s dress left on the line.

Wings blinked silver in the thick air, then went still.

The sound was not music, but machinery—

old and bone-deep—buzzing like some mechanical beast

abandoned among the trees.

Each morning, a fresh scattering: bodies curled on the walk,

spines split down the back. Their purpose was simple: rise, call,

reach for another before the heat took them down.

Many didn’t make it. Some came too early. Some flew crooked

into the jaws of dogs or the steel of passing cars. Still, they came.

By the thousands. Clinging to each other, to anything that held still

long enough to witness. What can be made of such a brief life?

Just a husk on a handrail, thin and hollow, gripping paint already

flaked by years of sun and rain, holding the shape of what once rose.

Still, they claw out from the dark, call to the canopy, connect in the chaos.

And when the air grows quiet, they drop, as they were always meant to—

maybe not in grace, but in order.