Here by Mónica Gomery
You don’t know where they came from only that they’re here now, and the email from the arborist says kill kill kill and their outer bodies are slate machinery grey but when you smash them between two chips of tree bark or clomp into them with your boots, a sudden eruption of lantern red, the inner lining of those curtainy wings, that red at once triumphant and subtle, for which they are named Spotted Lantern Flies, enemy of all maples, gorgers of sap with mouths like a straw, we don’t know how to be rid of them, the arborist tells us, so we must try everything: observe, scrape eggs, share news with your neighbors, he says I’m taking down hundreds a day, and that sickening satisfaction in killing them off, because it is so rare to go to war with a slow-moving bug, large as a thumb and arriving by thousands to our already scanty-treed city, sitting there on the trunk laying eggs over unhurried days, too easy to scoop up and flatten, yet always more of them swarming this town and its figs and its willows, and word gets around that we’re being invaded, lectures and flyers at the public library branch, neighbors lending one another their ladders, and you’re wondering, is it our fierce love of trees, is it our futuristic belief that the green lungs of this city will feed us, is it a middle class defense of neighbourhood beauty, is it the nagging desire we have for an enemy, is it our envy for the spotted lantern fly invasive and thriving at a time when it seems our own species blights our own survival on this plump spinning garden, we know they’re invasive because they come from some other country, sounds like not in my backyard, sounds like go back where you came from, and we know we want to be rid of them because trees are what breathes us, we know it’s unnatural to live in a place made of concrete and steel, so we defend its soil and its canopies, more than we ever defend one another, more feverishly than we will remember to honour our transience, to honour the need for swarm and survival, we say keep them out, keep our trees safe, sounds like keep them from our children, our front yards, and our women, you leave town for a weekend and when you come back there are two perched on the maple outside your house, huddled together, touching wings tucked against little mechanical bodies, the leaves of the maple growing a fiery red in the late light of October and they’re higher up on the tree than you can reach with your arms so you leave them, wonder when you’ll get to them later, if you’ll get to them later, what to do, what should you do, about the way people can’t tell nature and concrete, human and insect, migrant and invader, honour and greed, violence and benevolence, summer and autumn, neighbour and neighbour apart.
This poem was featured in Issue 08 of Canthius.
Mónica Gomery is a poet and rabbi living on unceded Lenni Lenape land in Philadelphia. Her work explores queerness, diaspora, ancestry, loss, theology, and cultivating courageous hearts. Her second collection, Might Kindred, won the 2021 Prairie Schooner/Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Poetry. She is also the author of Here is the Night and the Night on the Road (Cooper Dillon Books, 2018), and the chapbook Of Darkness and Tumbling (YesYes Books, 2017). Her poems have been awarded the Sappho Prize for Women Poets and the Minola Review Poetry Contest. Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Four Way Review, Muzzle Magazine, Adroit Journal, Poet Lore, and Poetry Northwest.