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

Poem 5, Dead Bees

This has been my first sight of bees
in months after Virginia, in the woods
near the pond where they took to endure
the heat. These two I carried with me
in a paper bag said,
                                    Marlo Barrera
                                    DEAD BEES
I could hear their bodies
against the paper. I could
hear their bodies.



Later, I held the bees
in the palm of my left hand
and walked home to you.

It was the streetlights that made
their bodies glow and my palm endured
the heat as a city block might.

I missed you terribly. The night was cool
but the bees were dead still.
I thought how best we would preserve
them. Last year this time I didn’t know
you and now I’m bringing these bees to you, a gift.





-marlo barrera, november 2009