fromThe Atlantic
1 week agoSummertime
Ash-brown tatters lofted on pheromones, gypsy moths flutter among boughs and across the meadow like confetti. Beyond hunger. Only sex drives the males. The females wait folded within crevices in bark. They've lost their mouths. Admirable to be so single-minded. Just days ago, as creepy adolescents they chewed the branches bare, littered the path with skeleton leaf-stalks, tore new craters out of the canopy so the sky fell through: we, too, could strip a forest, strip a continent, but not so lacily.
Environment