Contributor Series 7: The Confessional Diary of Bone
Exoskeletal Snacks: The Triumph of Osseous Matter
By KJ Hannah Greenberg
Aglet-sized Caeliferan rangers, forb-feeding paladins, small warrior-arbiters, wee bravery,
Your dense jungle justice does nada when it comes to hidden nares, claws, teeth;
High palapas homes go missing goodwives despite your exaggerated anthropoid perfidy.
Too many leaf-fashioned coracles, athames of spit, attitudes of Ubi pus, ibi evacua,
Backed by challengers with planned depredations, desultory appetites,
Swiftly silence tiny fighting mudras, gobble up chitinous boyars of big ambition.
Without the least susurration among the grasses, such enemies quash whole retinues,
Dash, forcibly, both bush cricket and katydid, gulp short-horns, grasshoppers,
Munch inconsequently on tiny Myrmidons missing the strength of bones.
Easily, opponents’ strentorious voices coalesce compliance from smaller sibilant staccato,
Pry apart insect soldiers foregut to proctodaeum, feast on creepy crawlies’ inchoate threats,
Broken bodies, lost grandeur, wobbly exoskeletons, jank life.
Whether Columbidae or American egrigen, vertebrae’s composite material prevails:
Rigid aprons are as nothing relative to weighted defenses;
The natural world’s not mawkish; evolution favors osseous critters.
Deviating Under the Starlight: Whispers of Divestment (November) was the most recent poem by KJ Hannah Greenberg to appear at vox poetica.
I love reading this poem. It is a complex web, a ecosystem of words. It reminds me of a wild boar head hung in a tree so the ants and maggots can eat it clean to shiny bone. Will you be publishing a translantion in English? Just kidding. Someday when our kind has disappeared, the millions of species of the order Coleoptera will scratch out their poetry in the beats of their hard forewings.