Yesterday I twisted open the cap of the world and in flowed locusts—tiny centurions, breasts bronzed with armor, their forelegs clanging together like swords upon shields. They twisted through the clouds like lightning. You saw them crashing toward you and I noticed you clenched your laptop to your chest as if you thought they were rain. You reminded me of Pharaoh cradling his son’s limp body in his arms, cursing me as though I were a motorist who had run the boy over and driven away. But you ducked into a Starbucks before the locusts hit and all hell quite literally broke loose. As you sat sipping your latte and typing on your screenplay, I watched the locusts strip bark from trees, paint from houses, stacks of letters from the hands of postmen, and then the postmen themselves, their uniforms collapsing into small blue heaps, which the locusts then devoured. You may not have seen the swarm invade the pet shop. They swirled like the great clouds of a tornado and ate and ate until the animals were merely white cages locked in larger cages, the shopkeeper’s bones slumped over the counter. You seemed not to appreciate their sweep through the bus station, leaving in their wake only watches, wallets, and here and there a prosthetic limb, the buses idling emptily in their lanes. Once they had eaten their fill, I watched as they spiraled back up into the atmosphere, the black mass of them blotting out the sun so that you thought it was night already and decided to head home for a bite. I know you were pissed that you had to walk all that way in the dark, but I did notice that locusts figure prominently into the end of Act II Scene VII and I wanted to say, you’re welcome.

Charcoaled stumps scrape low clouds, almost as if they scribble their names, the earth spinning a crude cursive beneath the sky. This is earth before the Reclamation, as they call it, the rocks and sludge bruised, giddy as a child fresh up from a bicycle tumble. Then the gloved hands will come to pick up the pieces, thrusting bulbs and saplings into the crust. Maybe there will be sunlight— the smoke and cloud blown fresh by a morning guster. Maybe springs will arc through here again—some branching-off of a distant river. Maybe roots will settle: and nests will settle: as we are settling into lawnchairs somewhere highways away. In Bohemia, a man once burned by the light of his own words, his eyes rolling earthward under the tall paper hat of a heretic. Lashed already to the post, he swore an oath to the snap and spark of straw and charred cherrywood as beggars held out their hands to the rising fire of his memory. This is how the flames lick us, trees and streams and birds so hot inside we groan to feel them growing— the earth on our hands black, and red, and greener every second.