Annie Stenzel

With a mayfly, you must. An adult mayfly’s life is one long day, 
and then curtains. First, Ephemera vulgata, your two years or so as larvae, 
occupying crevices on a rocky bottom. Then, underwater, creeping
over the river bed as newly-hatched little nymphs, you cleanse 
your world, eating algae and other sub-aquatic tidbits. 
You have two eyes and six legs and stay busy 
until the time comes for you to rise to the surface, jettison 
that first skin, and take flight, maybe. But before you are airborne, 
many of you are quickly food for coots, mallards, 
mergansers. And plenty more of you, gauzy-winged and resting 
until the wet wings dry, disappear into the mouths of fishes. 
As for the lucky few, the rest of your life—that single
day—is nothing other than the rush to mate. Males, you 
must flap and flap those flimsy wings in order to parachute down
in an attractive fashion—that’s what the females want to see. 
Mating while airborne, then separating, a female’s job
is to aim her drift of eggs for the river’s bottom, and again, 
many from the milky cloud—of hundreds, perhaps a thousand—
land in the mouths of whatever’s hungry. The hectic tempo
of that single day exhausts you all and your spent bodies
fall to the water from which you came. A blink and you’re gone,
transformed into the evening meal for some attentive amphibian,
but most likely unaware of the speed at which your life flew past.


 

Annie Stenzel (she/her) is a lesbian poet whose work has appeared in Atlanta Review, Gavialidae, Lily Poetry Review, Night Heron Barks, O:JA&L, rust + moth, Saranac review, Thimble, Third Wednesday, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She lives on unceded Ohlone land within walking distance of the San Francisco Bay.