LUCAS ROSSI

THE BIG BANG SINGULARITY AS LEPIDOPTERA; OR, SUGAR

Is he not still alive? Does the sweet light

Not strike his eyes?

— Dante

Our life was sweetened

once by three Small Whites,

three pests of crucifer

flying trefoils together,

a mandala in love crossing

setae as electrons free

of nuclei; or a crystal

formed purely by assent:

I will, I will, I will.

But absent further force

how soon they came

apart—slowed the sex

and dance, their widening

triangle out- and over-

growing even air

until nearly all was only

distance between them.

We gave them space,

lived a while in the last un-

compassed corner of a planet

where seraphs shone,

where sweet sunned the cirrus

of our inlet, our atom

warmed by ohms of ohr

emanated of mon:

the memory of three softs

once sugar, turning

into the universe.

INVASION OF THE FRANKENBEES

It turns the insects themselves into bioweapons.

— Bernhard Warner, ‘Invasion of the “frankenbees”: the danger of building a better bee’

Put a graft in the gash for her gender. A gorge,

and she emerges: bulletproof, superb, with a good gut

and curves that won’t brown in the sun. Able to abort:

a black-and-blonde bomb who will pop the unfit

pupae, the pure, the virgin and unmutated. A fat

grenade full of gears and cogs and goo and jelly:

uncollapsible, beautiful blueprinter of the royal we.

So she increases: pristine peons, many new shes

who roll out along her treasure trails in tens

of thousands, roping and groping along her belly,

plowing freight through fur and buzzing like trains.

These killer ladies voyage out to the sun’s

glory-holes, dark seed-funds and rapeseed reservoirs,

and for once return unblued by dangerous flowers.

There is nothing sweeter than the love of a drone

for its genome; for queendom, the ardor of apostles.

So whet the stems of roses like swords; thumb thorns

and cock bullets of venom in barrels of blossoms.

Against them all our armament, our ecocide colossal,

will be no matter. Mankind multiplant, can’t you see?

The future is for the bees, and we are history.

MOTHS

The way the dusty-white moth bodies looked

when I cut them open with a razor blade

after they had died, and their pupae had failed

from lack of care,

was a lot like the warning signs

outside a sewage well where green

pond water drained, because of

how orange and frightening

they were,

and a lot like summer turning

to Fall, because of the way I had

let them die, not even watching,

and it only happening because

it had to,

and a lot like the sun couched

in rainclouds, slipping through them,

sliding into a late blue sky the day

before the equinox, because of how

much light seemed to dwell in the flesh

of that sky,

and maybe just a little

like dying any death,

or living any other life.

Lucas Rossi is a Brooklyn-based poet, occasional musician, and insect enthusiast from Excelsior, Minnesota who holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon. He was also an artist in residence at the Rabbit Island residency in 2019.