Jacquelyn Bengfort
The Functional Bloodlessness of Insects
The songbird lands, opening its beak to set down the moth it carries.
The moth has yet to die. It flickers, without rising from the gutter. The bird shows no concern that the moth might escape. The stories moths might tell their children, of vicious songbirds, had they hearts or heads big enough for grief.
The roses avert their faces from the scene. They wear fresh electric pink that has yet to suffer the heat of summer; they have dates with bees this afternoon. They would rather not think on death.
The crepe myrtles and maples witness without comment. Their rings, generally speaking, have no particular way of noting that in my seventeenth season, I watched a little thing panic and ripple for a second or two at the end of its life. Maybe for larger animals, bleeding into the ground. And in my fifteenth season I fed briefly on a substance like sea water.
The larger animals, running by with their ears stuffed with music, steering their metal boxes down the hot tar street, seem indifferent as the sun. The sun did not blink out for even a moment, though it seems to the larger animals to be blazing hotter every year.
Lunch with a Poet: A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Story
1. The poet sits before you and invites you to fall in love with her by having her tell you something you already know, but with better-arranged words.
2. If you would like the poet to establish her authority by invoking her working-class roots, go to stanza three. If you would like the poet to establish her authority by referencing her military past or educational attainments, go to stanza five.
3. She wears scuffed boots and you compliment them. The poet tells you that the boots are a gesture toward making her mid-’90s self happy, how she could not afford the brand back then, how she was grateful to her parents for the nine dollars they spent yearly getting a library card. She used to help her father trap gophers and kept the tails in a peanut butter jar full of salt, because the county paid trappers a buck apiece bounty for dead stripeys. The tails were the proof.
4. If you would like the poet to discuss the biology of (a) common animal(s), go to stanza seven. If you would like the poet to peer at the sky and mutter about strange weather, go to stanza eight.
5. She wears a too-large ring on her right hand and you ask about it. The poet tells you how she spent years on various warships, fighting pirates and eating tropical fruit and not jumping overboard even once. She begins to speak in acronyms and praise for the sea. The ring came when she graduated from a military academy. She has, she hastens to add, a master’s degree in anthropology, too. Something something we are animals, something something strangest animals.
6. If you would like the poet to make you feel uncomfortable in your body, go to stanza nine. If you have lost interest in the story, go to stanza ten.
7. The poet has serious eyes. Are you sad? you ask her. No, she says, not exactly, but her preschooler has a lot of questions about death. There are so many dead things on these city streets, she says. Yesterday, they saw a crushed squirrel buzzing with flies. Two days before that, a dismembered finch, legs and wings scattered everywhere and sandpaper dry. There was also a snake. There is also a cemetery full of cut granite and stained glass.
8. The poet blinks back tears. What’s wrong? you ask her. She looks at the sun. It’s so damned hot, she tells you. Hotter every year, it seems like. Hotter, stranger. What world have I brought children into, she asks you. Where will my children live? Where can we run to?
9. Do you ever think about souls, where they hide in the body? asks the poet. Just think: you can lose a great deal of your body and your soul stays intact. You can get replacement parts, and you’re still you, aren’t you? Even the brain needn’t be entire to harbor a soul. So where the fuck is it, anyway?
10. The poet looks into your eyes, exhales. The sigh is deep, like the earth is using her for a set of vocal chords. I’m showing you all the strings I pull here, she says. Of course it’s not very good. What did you expect?
11. Congratulations! You’ve found the bonus ending. The poet was hoping to tell you of death and hope and not make it too obvious, but she sewed the seams of the story all wrong and all the stuffing is on the outside and the cloth is holey and raw. She gestures with empty hands that look full, lifts the story she carries into the air with a lost gesture. Those were all my best tricks, she says. I am sorry if they weren’t enough.
About Jacquelyn Bengfort
Jacquelyn Bengfort was raised in North Dakota, educated at the U.S. Naval Academy and Oxford University, and now lives in Washington, DC. She is the author of Navy News Service (Ghost City Press, 2018), and her work has been published by Gargoyle, District Lines, The Fem, Jellyfish Review, and Cease, Cows, among other places. She's the recipient of 2018 and 2019 individual artist fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. She can be found on the web at www.JaciB.com and on Twitter @jacib.
Photo credit Jesse Grimes.