locusts: a mutually attracted species
I am thinking maybe here could be a chance for the Rocky Mountain locust to have some god-fearing return like a hunger, raise hell here. Eighteen seventy- four: twelve point five trillion insects, twenty-seven point five million tons and hungry too, no, starving. Two hundred million dollars in crop damages in the west. Left the place barren like a handful of sand. There was already a drought. Everyone was already hungry. The sugars in the stalks made the locusts want.
Thirty years later, farmers had a hand in their extinction so that North America is the only populated continent without a major locust. Not a single one was saved. What it must have felt like to shed. What it must have felt like rejecting a body. Here, I have spent too many nights making decisions, my own body wrapped around a toilet.