Pandemic Harvest

Locust tree beans, shriveled leaves, withered 
remnants of the Rose of Sharon—all swirl 
like sooty snow around my feet, the only gathering 
left in quarantine. I gave up on the zucchini 

long ago, the bees having fled, refusing 
their duty to pollinate. Tomato plants 
drop blossoms all week long. A hazy orange 
light filters through wisteria’s canopy, 

casting Armageddon’s glow on the patio. 
The sun is veiled in brimstone, blown 
smoke from wildfires 1,500 miles away, 
the heat there a hundred and twenty-three. 

It is the time of locusts. Plagues in Africa, 
while here, holes punctuate the ground, evidence 
the cicada killer has emerged 
with its black and yellow stripes, its vicious 

speed, targeting the larva. Nature balances 
the scales, making poetry obsolete 
and yet all that remains, the world purified 
and reduced to an epigraph of ash. 

JANICE NORTHERNS

Janice Northerns is the author of Some Electric Hum, winner of the Byron Caldwell Smith Book Award (University of Kansas) and the Nelson Poetry Book Award and a WILLA Literary Award Finalist in Poetry. The author grew up in Texas and now lives in southwest Kansas. Read more at www.janicenortherns.com.