Half-life
of a half-crushed wasp: writhing
and whiptailed.
*
Mr. Venom-Sac
knocked splat.
Dregs of legs.
*
Nailed, mosquito
stigmata.
*
No-see-um smeared
across the page:
bleeding eye-slit.
*
What flies in the face
of good taste
flies apart. Moth, time has run out
on your working parts.
*
Spider’s good leg
quivers, as if to point
where it hurts.
*
Fruit flies rave in air
when I lift the plum.
Like watching
my own skin crawl.
Published online October 30, 2013
Carmine Starnino’s most recent collection, This Way Out (Gaspereau, 2009), was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. His previous collections include Credo (2000), which won the Canadian Author’s Association Prize for Poetry and With English Subtitles (2004), which won the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. He has edited The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry (Vehicule, 2005) and Best Canadian Poetry in English 2012. He lives in Montreal, where he is poetry editor for Vehicule Press and senior editor for Reader’s Digest Canada. Lazy Bastardism: Reviews and Essays on Canadian Poetry was published by Gaspereau Press and appeared in Fall 2012.
