We all have the same little bones in our foot twenty-six with funny names like navicular. Together they build something strong— our foot arch a pyramid holding us up. The bones don’t get casts when they break. We tape them—one phalange to its neighbor for...
Newsmen call it the Cuban Missile Crisis. Teachers say it's the end of the world.
At school, they instruct us to look up and watch the Cuban-cursed sky. Search for a streak of light. Listen for a piercing shriek, the whistle that will warn us as poisonous...
Hybridization, cross-breeding, evolution: He takes to new theories like a puppy takes to ice cream. We whisper that our Green-Thumb Boy is the black Mendel, that Darwin would have made good use of Carver's eyes. So clear his gift for observation: the best collector I've ever known. I...
Arachis Hypogaea may have been smuggled to North America by slaves who hid seeds of survival in their hair. Despite your nakedness, the chains, the stench, if white men did not eat you, you might come to a cruel land where, tended by moonlight and exhaustion, your...
When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured...
Oh, fly, you flew onto my leaf and not my food. What a relief! For on my food you'd bring me grief as you're a vector of disease. But you on leaf? My mind's at ease. And there is much to please my eye. For oh, you are a lovely fly. Just do not go and multiply.
When you were building the i-10 bypass, one of your dozers, moving earth at the center of a great pit, slipped its thick blade beneath the water table, slicing into the earth’s wet palm, and the silt moistened beneath the...
sun sunwarm sunwarm on back sunwarm on back legs sunwarm on back legs loosens my heart my heart beats my heart beats faster in sunwarm my heart beats faster I flex I flex legs I flex legs loose with sunwarm ...
Sun slant low, chill seeps into black water. No more days of bugs and basking. Last breath, last sight of light and down I go, into the mud. Every year, here, I sink and settle, shuttered like a shed. Inside, my eyes close, my heart slows to its...
It's a bug's world of intrigue and mystery, with humans a blip in their history. So when insects flitter and scurry past us Take note, because they may outlast us!