- The American Burying Beetle
lives under only six states. With its facetedblack & orange head, it resembles those outfits in the 1920s when the tombs at Karnak were explored. The bug belongs to the family Silphidae & to the genus Necrophorus, & during this awful year when humans are upset, the American burying beetle goes on atthe brink of extinction costing the oil& gas industry millions of dollars while it carries the bodies of dead creatures underground to lay its eggs on the corpses, lurching & arching its femurs & its tarsi & its geometrical bright parts to farm the rotting flesh for its larvae to feast on, & when they are ready, to fly off from. What a wonder that so much exists with no guile, that existence itself has no rival & goes on as the thing most steadily hoped for. When i feeldesperate about humans, i think of thisworker under the six states remaking the dead. [End Page 5]
Brenda Hillman is the author of ten collections from Wesleyan University Press, most recently Extra Hidden Life, among the Days (2018). She has cotranslated At Your Feet, the poems of Ana Cristina Cesar (Free Verse Editions, 2018). She presently serves as a chancellor at the Academy of American Poets and lives in the Bay Area where she is the Olivia Filippi Professor of Poetry at Saint Mary's College in Moraga, California.