The odd configuration caught my eyeas I knelt and weeded the fence line.A Chinese Mantis was clasping a small body,head and throat already consumed.
Summer lunch in the garden after silent prayer,triangular head down, metronome of the mandibles,a bucolic horror. The entrée, ruby-throated hummingbird.I couldn’t tell if the bird were male or female.
Her throat would have been milky white, for hidingamong leaf shadows, or if his, shimmering redfor flashing, dancing arcs of display.Cardinal vines exploded across that section
of fence, chorus of trumpets praising the sun,and the hunter was well-hid.I planted those vines to attract and feed the hummers,but now see what I had wrought.
Put on bright colors, decorate with blossoms,look over the shoulder with raised eyesand ask the ancient question. Hope the desiredwill approach, partake, return, return again, and stay.
I hoped to be delicious, sustaining as mana,a promised land. If the answer was yes,then we each would take a long deep drink.Sometimes you dine, sometimes you offer the dish.
The female mantis goes so far as to eat the head of her mate.Filet the self, crack open the carapace and revealthe earnest, insistent, wriggling mess—moles, scars,wet mouth of want, teeming dreams of love so long sought.
That day in the garden, I inched closer,and she raised her head, skewered mewith compound eyes, then deftly stilled herselfon the tender vine, holding tight to the uneaten half.
I stood there, transfixed by reality’s pin.Now I look down into the December garden,the beds all cleaned and the fences bare,an egg sac clinging to a dogwood branch.
A familiar pain comes back, just here,under skin and bone, the old ache below fleshonce so hungrily consumed, echo of a long-healed wound,a cicatrice, the ghost of the girl I used to be.
*the mark or scar of a healed wound or burn
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