new lil thing is crying out for spring. please. im dying. enjoy my latest finished poem.

raw text at bottom if you prefer to read in that format.

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