Locusts

You loved me like locusts devouring a field,
sudden plague of insect mandibles jawing dry wheat
and sweet corn, knocking back their body weight
in crops, four hundred sixty miles across. I loved you
something Biblical, unprecedented, like villagers
peering up at a sky gone dark with wings. Sometimes
a harvest is aching for it. Sometimes it's delicious
to pick bones clean. Locusts, everyone knows,
are just grasshoppers under particular conditions.
And oh, what an insatiable swarm; what a way to go.
All year I watched you congregate over me, letting
your million small parts coalesce into a buzzing horde
with a ravenous agenda, until it seemed inevitable,
until every surrender felt like an act of God.

Betsy Housten is a double Sagittarius queer writer and massage therapist, and winner of an Academy of American Poets award. Her writing appears in Bone & Ink Press, Entropy, Glassworks, Lunch, Longleaf Review and many other places. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net. She lives in New Orleans, where she is pursuing her MFA in poetry. Find her on Twitter @popcorngoblin.