Many Mantises, poems by Michael S Begnal

Michael S Begnal is the author of Future Blues (Salmon Poetry, 2012) and Ancestor Worship (Salmon Poetry, 2007), as well as the chapbook The Muddy Banks (Ghost City Press, 2016). His work has appeared in journals and anthologies such as Notre Dame Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Empty Mirror, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Scoundrel Time, and Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), and he has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He can be found online at www.mikebegnal.blogspot.com and https://twitter.com/Michael_Begnal .

Many Mantises

The magical insect appears again crawling out of the bag you brought them in, a long slender body and glowing green wings

now two or three different entities, legs and reds and antennae feathery and powdered— you want to protect them but it is their nature to emerge— one will become enmeshed in the local ecosystem, another vibrates when it bites, and the silver mantis escapes onto the bar as the owner whacks at them—

it is what owners do and have always done, they’re gonna do it and are doing it to you,

no way to stop it now that they’ve seized control of the parameters of perception: we are always living in normal times

Rhino

Something has gone wrong and we face imminent peril— from the regime, its supporters, their stockpiles of automatic weapons already they attack us with executive decrees, expunging of the electoral rolls, the defunding of services, the theft of our common capital and care, the theft of kids coming across the border—

murder us, like the rhino in the zoo, horn sawed off as she lay bleeding in her cage

Palindrome VI

It is like we enter into this room, spherically shaped and filled with forms, and in this room we too acquire forms and feelings, blues and angers, anxiety and the joyous joining with others/ joining with you sentiently, and the dolorous pools of danger rewire and morph into leafings and on this moor we two, shaped and filled with form, as to a mushroom, fiercely, it is like we enter

This Be My News

This be my news: that there is a field of action, that whether dry or wet it awaits a poet’s words and that (still) there’s wine, in the grass lazily blowing with the crickets and the katydids and like them you sometimes fly through the autumn air up from the grass, that the field is thus also vertical and you might rise like a mist off the moss

and fly through the floss till you see the purple light of clouds, and see yourself as the others—as mantises— see

“you”

© Michael S Begnal