a bug’s life

SUMMER CONTEST

this summer, we launched a call far and wide to summon writings about the insectal.

we flew on the back of a moth, peered into the insides of a cocoon, and dangled from the ceiling suspended by a line of silver thread.

we spoke to the last firefly on earth and looked into the eyes of an orchid mantis. we were orb weavers, ladybugs, bees, wasps.

we’re bringing the best of the best to you. read the winning entries below with commentaries from our staff.

stay luminous.

—caylee weintraub, editor-in-chief

HONORABLE MENTION

MICHAEL YUYA MONTROY
my friend goo

“You know, the ancient Buddhist philosopher Memyō was said to have turned himself into a silkworm in order to clothe the poor,” my man said. I lay the thread out on the table in front of us, bright red.

“I don’t think it’s silk,” I said, running a finger across it, slightly damp, birthed from my cheek.

At first I had feared that the lump was cancer. I poked at it, and it ached, and I had my man poke at it, and it throbbed, and then I finally broke down and made a doctor’s appointment, and the morning of, the thing ripped and I wrestled a long red thread from the side of my face, which came out easily, and I stuck a Band-Aid on the thing and it barely scarred, other than the $50 cancellation fee the doctor’s office hit me with.

Three months later, and the lump raised again, in the same place on the apple of my cheek. I stuck my head under a towel over my man’s Korean face steamer, and this time it seamed open easily, released the thread, and closed itself once more. It wasn’t sinew or rooted in me at all, and with the steam, it hummed happily and didn’t hurt when I touched it.

I took the thread into my room like an offering and stored it in the top drawer of my dresser with the other one, which still glistened wetly, though by now it felt more like a dried bit of leaf or other natural roughage.

The next morning, when I went into the bathroom, my entire face had swollen up with little clusters, nearly a dozen of them dotting my cheeks and neck and forehead. My man came in behind me and stared at me through the mirror for a moment. The cricket-like shutter sound of his camera taking a photo ate through the silence.

After a week over the steamer each day, I whined at him from my boggy sub-towel environment that this must be how pregnant women felt, once their days and movements became subject to the parasite nesting within them. How I wanted to run, go to the batting cages, claw my face off.

“Don’t be so dramatic,” my man said, dramatically. 

He snapped another photo of me as I emerged from the steamer. We swiped through the gallery, comparing my face and features from each of the last seven days. I thought that they were growing decidedly larger. My man said they looked the same. 

He pulled a pinch of my skin between two of his fingers, delicately, as if receiving a slice of mandarin orange. I could feel the thread wrapping around itself, spooling into a spiral, a soft bit of fluid at the back of my jaw wondering what it was going to become.

“Does it hurt?” my man asked.

“Murrgh,” I said, which felt right.

***

I opened my eyes, but it was dark. I could taste a little light coming from all around me, warm brown against my vision, moving, fuzzy. I wondered if I was going blind, or if the lumps had swollen so much that my eyes were sealed shut behind them. I took in a shaking breath, my tongue dripping up my head, trying to lick behind my eyeballs. Not being able to see itched, though the softly moving darkness comforted me. I reached my hand out to touch my man beside me. I heard him gasp and felt him sit up. Somewhere in the room in his direction, the camera shutter went off.

***

One of the lumps didn’t make it.

I pressed tenderly on either side of it, gone cold, and it popped out, bigger since I’d been tending to it, but not yet fully formed. I took a pair of tweezers and peeled the thread back, which came away and curled in on itself like a little husk, and with the tweezers, I delicately lifted the frail, glasslike webbing of the body of the deceased. 

It came up and apart easily, almost a wing, almost a leg, small parts that had been stilled, mid-formation. I plunged the tip of the tweezers into it, pinning it there to my kitchen table, seeing what it could have been, mad at myself.

My man had sent me the picture he’d taken that first morning when they emerged, me laying in bed, drenched in sun, swimming in butterflies. They were drinking in my eyes, the dew of my skin, powder and legs and their dark wings seething across my face a brilliant red.

***

 I had loved him so much, my man. I thought of him often, each memory pressing itself into a wriggling thing, nestling in my skin until I was numb to it, blooming once I could think of it fondly.

I finished rearranging all of the flowers I’d brought into my room and went to sit on the floor in front of the mirror. The butterflies lapped at the flowers eagerly, a few alighting on my face, checking in on the hills of new cocoons just beginning to form.

Michael Yuya Montroy writes about bodies, divinities, ghosts, and the ‘90s. His academic background and research interests explore the ways in which queerness and marginalized people/spaces are depicted in Japanese art, religious literature, and punk rock music. He lives on a river in rural North Carolina.

THIRD PLACE

ALLISON CAMP
arachnophilia

Suspended on strings
of nothing, plucking

with a spindly arm
along the shower ceiling.

Her name is Rhonda, I decided one day,
water streaming down my body.

I gazed up at the spider,
her elegant long legs

and slender form
tending a brown orb.

Rhonda patiently waited.
Her brood hatched and now

30 tiny dots of baby
spider surround her.

I watch daily from my wet perspective
because what right do I have

to kill Rhonda and her new
constellation of young?

There is plenty of room here for all of us.

Allison Camp is a Washington State native living and working in North Carolina. She has a deep love for biology and the fascinating details that abound in nature. The natural world is her primary source of creative inspiration. Allison is a scientist by training and spends her days as a medical writer for UNC Chapel Hill. Her musings on creativity and science can be found on her Substack: https://allisoncamp.substack.com/.

SECOND PLACE

AMANDA AUCHTER
the Last Firefly on Earth

Nearly 1 in 3 firefly species in the United States may be threatened
with extinction due to habitat loss, overuse of pesticides, light
pollution, and climate change. —Washington Post, 2023

It’s lonely among the anemones
and birth bath. I fold my feelings
in backyards, pitch them over 
fences and the snap of a dog’s
teeth. When you look at me all you
think is lantern in the fist, your
adolescent first kiss. All this 
time I have been writing your name 
across the sky. You, who capture 
my urgent song in jam jars, 
the warm palms of your hands. 
The windstorm buffets my body 
from roof to rainspout and all 
my tracers go out. Don’t pity me, 
dear stranger. Turn off the highway 
lights, dampen the ditches. 
Cut the engine.

Amanda Auchter is the author of The Wishing Tomb, winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry and the Perugia Press Book Award, and The Glass Crib, winner of the Zone 3 Press First Book Award for Poetry. Her writing appears in publications such as Alaska Quarterly Review, HuffPost, CNN, Black Warrior Review, Shenandoah, Tupelo Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day project, among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College and lives in Houston, TX.

WINNER

HANA WISNUARDI
to the core: poems

“Ophiocordyceps unilateralis”

Where the head and thorax meet,
between tectonic plates, in hemolymph dust,
a branch erupts, bearing brown studded fruit
like lychee that has lost its juicy pink,
and the roots of the budding orchard are mandibles
lock-jawed around the plump veins
pulsing down the bellies of leaves.
The queendom does not flee
from the graveyard of mummified
sisters and daughters disfigured
by mycelia scars and one blossomed antler each.

“Gypsobelum” 

There is nothing to unzip or unpeel 
when the slugs make out on sweaty lichen carpet;
an unpracticed show for the spiders and doves. 

The slugs kiss each other’s chins by mistake, 
washed in fog and sizzling green song, 
armed with arrows until the blood fills up, 
and when the swelling trips the bowstring inside, the lovers
honor marksmanship with a prize of pearly knives. Only
their syrupy bodies know the ancient potion 

paving their insides like clay jars 
to save slug seeds that will sprout into archers who
ache and wound under the same dancing spell.

“Hymenopus coronatus” 

Thirst tempts the fly to drink from the 
mangled orchid. Petals fray into antenna and
fracture into grinning forelegs with thorny teeth.
The orchid lifts the fly to its snout like a warm cup.
Who fastened lace into the limbs of this demon,
and kissed it with a color so sweet that it almost whispers
do not eat? How did the saintly flowers accept
the lipless fraud who swayed and blushed and stepped
upon them with its slender feet? The fly lays her wings to rest
like a baby blanket in the embrace 
of the prettiest creature ever sewed, returning,
in a way, to the deer carcass in which she was laid.

Hana Wisnuardi is a writer from Dallas, Texas. Her creative work has been published or is forthcoming in Literary Veganism and Terrain.org. She has a cat named Squid, a Giant Microbe collection, and a yearning to go tidepooling. You can reach her at hana.wisnuardi@gmail.com.