On the highest dose, the funnel web spider spun an actual black hole. The testing equipment, fields of thistle, and rows of red brick houses have since been lost. Stoned aphids, now too frantic to be policed by ants and ladybugs, have started a species-wide orgy, with numbers reaching the sextillions. Unfettered masses of tiny humping bodies, piling into the clouds, creating both meal and obstacle for birds. One cannot be too safe in this modern world. A butterfly on LSD will use its proboscis to unlock your front door. There is much sugar to be had, much air to stir. And if that wasn’t enough, experiments on crickets are yielding alarming results. Japanese scientists have found that certain “drugged” melodies produced by Meloimorpha japonicas, or Suzumushi, are reanimating dead human flesh. A severed finger was videotaped writhing to a hind-leg fiddle. I ask myself what Bach would do with such an orchestra. Mahler? We might still find out.
old sheet music
the silverfish compose
themselves
—The haiku “old sheet music” first appeared in The Heron’s
Nest (March 2021).
work has recently appeared in Acorn, Contemporary Haibun, Frogpond, The Heron’s Nest, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and Modern Haiku. He is the author of a collection of haiku and haibun, How to Disassemble Your Father’s Ghost (Kattywompus Press, 2017), and his haibun story of the same name is anthologized in The Best Small Fictions 2015. With a fondness for whiskey and whippoorwills, he divides his time between the lights of Nashville and the woods of his native Kentucky.
