A silverfish on my pillow, dropping off into a box
of books, a fruit fly hovering, and sow bugs,

cousin to the barnacle: seven dead curled
beneath the tub (held to the light, they’re gold);

one live one, all perfect articulation and large
as a tooth, easing around the edge

of my foot. An orb weaver suspended between
the window and the screen, and twin

garden-variety spiders, frozen fireworks one inch
from the kitchen sponge, draped between the orange

and the salt. A soldier beetle guards the door,
shining elytra closed over

the wings neatly as the cover over piano
keys, as the gold leaf canopy

opens: the gypsy moth king wrapped in ermine
throbs the screen as if to say: Behold this inhuman

beauty: are you jealous? Yes, I am.
What a feat, to lay one’s head down

on the ground zero of consciousness, where
armor unfurls its chrysanthemum petals right

from the bones, where the mouth is a scissors, and claws
creep under the shadow of wings

with venation more splendid than any rose
window— and then one surrenders

even one’s ruthlessness, one’s exoskeletal,
perfect self-control,

as these three cicada carapaces
kneeling on the screen. Some cool air

drifts through the window; one
cloud suspends the evening. I’m reading when

a mosquito comes singing to the valley
of my ankle. I raise the book to kill it,

but miss, and the mosquito wobbles for
the ceiling, a bubble in a pool,

then vanishes. Yet I hear it droning,
lecturing about what to attend to,

what to forge, what to lose. I ignore it,
crouching down again to read, inert

and resilient tonight as platinum.
Outside a car passes, glides its headlight down my arm.