Moth Stream by Gary Every

The moon shines through my window at midnight
as I toss and turn, unable to sleep
but I am capable of dreaming plenty.
It is not the moon which keeps me awake
nor even the wind
which rattles the leaves in the trees
and shakes my window frame.
It is knowledge which gives me insomnia.
I have recently learned something startling.
Moths, tiny soft fuzzy winged insects,
can somehow sense the direction of the wind
and as the seasons change
so that the moths feel the need to migrate,
all the moths at once,
elevate a mile or two into the sky
where the breeze tosses the tiny airborne creatures
in the direction they wish to go,
hurling them swiftly,
as fast as sixty miles an hour.
How extraordinary it must be
to be so tiny and be flung so fast
and so far.
Do the moths have any grasp
of the massive geography they cover so quickly?
Outside my window nighttime flowers bloom,
trumpeting datura and white yuccas flickering atop their stalks
like candle flames,
beckoning for the moths to drop from the sky.
I lie awake at night unable to sleep
trying to imagine millions of moths
two miles above my bed
soaring through the air at sixty miles an hour,
cursed with insomnia
caught up in a streaming dream of moths.

Gary Every, Arizona, USA

Well Sprung by Jim Howe

I don’t remember

how old I was,

seven or eight,

when I first felt the urge

to capture

an enchanted being.

I caught him

in the gentle grasses

of our side yard.

Cupped in my right hand

he waited –

his antennae receiving signals

from distant worlds,

his cold eyes

measuring the texture of my skin,

his armor sparkling

in the shadows of my fingers,

his legs akimbo.

An emerging spirit

opened my prison.

I held out my hand

as straight as a diving board.

The grasshopper sprang

with power and grace:

a green arc

of parabolic escape.

It never knew

what it left behind:

a bonfire in my chest,

a salty koan,

a certain point

I couldn’t hold onto.

Jim Howe, IL, USA

Bumble by De Jackson

My son says the honeybees are dying. 
Some of those fat fuzzy fancy-free meandering ones, too. 

They’re getting sick, he says, voice thick with sadness.
I am not entirely up on these things. I assume
we have once again dusted our crops with poison or
overfilled one too many dumps or finally hair sprayed
our world into submission. Maybe they took one look
at our selfish hearts and their own simply stopped
beating. My boy is 9, loves all living things. I want to
tell him it will all be okay, that there are swarms
of scientists whose entire job it is to figure this out,
that he can be one of them someday if he wants
to, that surely someone, someday will find the cure
for our acute case of narcissism. I do tell him these
things, even as I wonder when the ‘birds and bees’
talk came to include such words as endangered and
extinct. And even as I taste the words on my own
tired tongue,
                   I hope to God I’m not lying. 

De Jackson, Nevada, USA

Mutualism by M P Jones IV

what do the honeybees
and the hummingbirds
think they are doing
as they dip and drop,
weaving the wind
in the red fringed
feathery fields of lace

in what language
does the fungal earth
thank its leafy grasses?

we are all
islands of misanthropy,
insular universes,
pillars of solitude,

but why, then,
do mitochondria flourish
in the sovereign nations
of our flesh,

and why do I yearn
in the stillest hours
for your breath on my skin?


M P Jones IV

Tanager by Thomas O'Dore

descending a forested ridge
where the valley slopes away
I look down upon one canopy
and up into another

from the lower swift and silent
a black fetched crimson arrow
pierce disappears into green wall
startle shot from a bur oak top
my intrusion \ launching flight
of the last scarlet tanager I have seen

where he went
where they’ve gone
six billion people
one scarlet tanager

The Days Dissolve by Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal

It kills me to lay here
as the days dissolve
and are tucked away.

I look at the stars
because they are nothing
like me. They are
bright and mystical.

I am more like the birds
flying off on tangents.


 Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal, CA, USA

haiku by Jeffrey Winke

café window view