Poem 6: Locusts

Locusts: A Mutually Attracted Species

I am thinking maybe here could be a chance for the Rocky Mountain locust to have some god-fearing return like a hunger, raise hell here. Eighteen seventy-four: twelve point five trillion insects, twenty-seven point five million tons and hungry too, no, starving. Two hundred million dollars in crop damages in the west. Left the place barren like a handful of sand. Left everyone hungry. There was already a drought. Everyone was already hungry. The sugars in the stalks made the locusts want though.

Thirty years later, farmers had a hand in the extinction of them so that plowing now seems dangerous and secure so that North America is the only populated continent without a major locust. We didn’t save a single one. What it must have felt like to shed. What it must have felt like rejecting a body. Here, I have spent too many nights making decisions, my own body wrapped around a toilet.


-marlo barrera, november 2009