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Musical Pairing:
aphid | E. G. Ware
Beneath the leaf, belief, a brief relief of green, they seam themselves along
the vein’s ravine,
minute, obtuse, profuse, no bigger than a seed of doubt, no louder than a
louse of light.
Pear-shaped drupes of pulp and hush, blush-pink, bile-yellow, jet and jade,
they fade into the chloric shade, antennae thin as silvered wire, legs like
script in sap’s attire.
Rearward, two small pipes, not mouths but spouts, a paired exhalant doubt
that pouts when pressed.
Disturb the nest and see them slow, flee, flow,
a viscous drift, a syruped go, clustered low where new tips grow.
They tap the stem, they hem the hem, of tender phloem, siphon-slim;
they brim on inner juice and then
the leaves begin to fold and thin, to pucker, buckle, curl within,
a wrinkled skin of chlorophyll.
The shoot stands still. The bud will not. Growth caught in knot and
afterthought.
And what they cast is gloss and glass: a sugared smear, a shining
mass that gathers
ants in blackened bands, their mandibles like clasping hands.
A sooted bloom in humid air, spreads velvet there and settles square,
a mold of coal on emerald flare, a dimming film of fungal wear.
Worse, within their stylet’s needle-kiss travels more than amber’s abyss: a
hidden hiss, a viral script that flips the leaf to mottled crypt.
The damage deepens
past the sip; a fever rides the feeding lip.
They mother without mate or pause, no clause for courtship,
no because; each daughter brings another brood, already gravid,
interlude inside a body birthing fast,
a future nested in the last. A fractal cast of cast of cast, a swelling tide too
quick to past.
All season long the wingless bevy belong along the under-throng; then
sudden, sullen, some grow sails,
waxen veils of glass on slender tails, and lift to drift on heated gales, new
stems to scale, new leaves to flail.
In winter, linter, splintered bark, they mark themselves in ovate dark, eggs
like tarred and lacquered spark.
Come spring, they sting the tender green afresh unseen, anon between the
fold and hold of nascent sheen.
Yet hunters enter, coccinellid domes of red that spread and tread
where clusters fed; lacewing young with crescent jaws that gnaw the gnarl of
gum-drawn flaws; a thrush that flushes through the bed and pecks the
soft-bodied thread.
Or water, slaughter by a sudden shower, a power-spray that scours
the flower, that drowns the
town of pearled devour. Or thumb and cloth in simple sweep that reap
what crept in numbers deep.
Attend the first unfurling curl. Survey the vernal-leafed world. Before the
swarm can form its dome, before the gloss can glaze the loam, lean close,
and in the close bice prose you’ll note how
hunger grows in rows: small throats without a name, vert-limbed flame,
writing want in chlorous frame
again, again, again.
© E. G. Ware
You just wrote a whole hollow knight lore tablet. So pretty! ✨