The Great Mosquito Migration

Corey Green

"The world is gonna end soon.  Oh, don't worry.  It won't be for a while.  Not for like 80
years or so."
--Sylvia Browne

Deep, seething water pockets, over which pocked air had hummed
with no hearing ear or swatting hand, not even a long tail to swish it away

down there, brimming pools, unmoved for years, not since fish curled
their toes into the sand and gasped

but in the heat, even the summer-hot winter, the land dried plain and course, 
fecund as slate

one mosquito said there were pools farther north, an elder flitted 
to a parched mob his tale of warming shelf ice that trickled

a spa, warm enough for a flurry of larvae, all of them to grow
full of wing and snout long

the story an entomologist recounted on the news   He said--  

Thus began the great mosquito migration, hunched but eager mothers
hoisting their young on their backs for the long haul, fathers talking routes and trade winds

They flew for hours at a time, moving like a monstrous dark cranium, 
but unthinking, this is how people described them, more or less,

people in well-vented, but protective fiberglass shelters, 
replete with canned goods and bottled water, people who feared 

for their heifers and golden retrievers, scared of these piranhas of the air, 
as one woman called them,

imagined the mosquitoes hovering over their victims, figuring their prey like an equation   
But feeding is about hunger.  

Whole armies were hungry.

A mechanic in South Carolina saw his cat sucked dry, its mouth forever 
yawning, its body prepared for mummification,

nutria, dogs of all breed, but especially Chihuahuas, possums and deer, a few bums, even
hawks and owls, anything with blood marked a path northward, 

the event was momentous, and those who could see it followed the bodied trail
clear up the eastern seaboard, to Iceland and beyond,

then the humming stopped

soon, soon people knew the meaning   Impending death has a particular use,
a purge of vermin, unwanted pets, friends locked out and scrambling