three insect poems

Shantam Goyal

insecticide

waterbug with an extraterrestrial face

moves under a glass bowl and is

still when I wake up.

My precise foot crushes a

cigarette next to its tomb,

its transparent room.

Its giant body

dead by asphyxiation or a more

commonplace sickness,

or killed by boredom.

Its giant body

ended by loneliness, stilled

in a room with cream walls

and on them no pictures at all.

stinger

something bit my mother on the funicular

some unseen cryptid around her unbalance

a tilted carload of slipping feet and

a strange wasp taking the train uphill.

she rubbed the red into her skin

she pressed the welt now flattened

invisible when she unrolled her sleeves

we only knew when she couldn’t sleep.

morning cigarette

wingweary bee

somehow afloat

between two worlds

nectar and smoke