H.R. Webster

Swarm

In front of Beuys’ 7,000 Oaks
a strange man stops to pull a lanternfly
from my hair. Truth must be found, Beuys wrote
in reality, not systems. We tried
to grieve and in grieving re-make the world—
broken knife, shiva loaf. Like the locusts
whose rough art, abundance, revealed in swarms
the earth as hunger, song. Magnum opus
of forced forgetfulness: your felony
charge, your unforgiven loan, car mirror
smashed, taped back on. Its blank convexity,
its insect eye. The emerald ash borer’s
unbearable map in the sapwood.
This sick commonplace, the wing’s secret blood.

H.R. Webster is the author of What Follows (Black Lawrence Press, 2022). She lives and works in the Hudson Valley.