The Hungry Mayfly

I awake with a taste of absencewhere a mouth should be.

My lips are stitched into air,or perhaps they never were lips at all.A sudden heat rises inside my chest,wings crack like old paper

and remember how to beat.

The world is too full

of light, rot, and bloom—a harvest of which all is not for me.Hunger engulfs me with a mouth of wanting,claws me with a fist of wanting,

It is a religion of wanting.And I am a prayer that only asks to be filled.

Instinct presses like a fever: mate, mate, mate.But my prayer has yet to be sated.I imagine feeding on each promised body,not tender, but WILD

AND RECKLESS. The economyof devouring as salvation.

Below, the pond breathes in algae and slime.I clamber inrubbing my useless, vestigial lipsagainst green, fetid detritus.

The more I rub, the more the world provesit contains everything except what I need.My half-made bones scream the truth of ending.

I am small enough to vanish into atmosphere,I am loud enough to hear the deafening creaks of my own extinction.

Tonight I will be eaten by time.Tonight I will learn that wantingis a slow, dirty death.I will lift my wings and the sky will receive me.

I will fly until my wings remember nothing but the fall,and my last thought will be the shape of absence:a gut filled with air, hunger that never was sated,and the pond swallowing every prayer I had the courage to make.