Aedes Aegypti
by Brian Turner
With the audio on mute, the television
flickers over the bodies of lovers
tangled in dream, carbon dioxide
pluming from their mouths
the way factory smoke billows
from the industrial park outside of town.
Mosquitoes circle in a holding pattern above.
As the female’s wings beat 400 times
per second, the male’s at 600 hertz,
their wingtips trace the smallest figure-8s
into the invisible, a gesture toward the infinite.
Such brief lives they have. One month,
maybe, their coupling a conversation
at 1200 hertz, the high pitch of their union
an A above concert C—
Beethoven’s last note,
perhaps, the note he chose not to take
by feather from the well of ink
the way a mosquito might dip a stylet
in blood.
He let the note play itself out.
To recognize the cry of the bat
with its hunger returning. Blue notes
smoldered out from the throats of lovers.
That no matter how certain
the crushing weight of the indomitable,
even the smallest of flyers
raise their wings in music.
Brian Turner is a writer and musician; author of a memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country, two poetry collections (Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise), and a debut album with The Interplanetary Acoustic Team. He edited The Kiss anthology and curated the series on Guernica. He’s received a Guggenheim, a USA Fellowship, an NEA, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Lannan Foundation Fellowship. He’s published in The New York Times (online), National Geographic, Harper’s Magazine, and more. He directs the MFA at Sierra Nevada College.
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