A Plague of Ladybugs
by Scott Owens
Certainly not Biblical in its proportions,
no sharply angled legs, no alien
faces extruding grasshopper spit,
only a fraction the size,
almost cute, but for the feeling
of six legs on the back of your neck,
in your hair at night, the sense
of constant motion at the edge of sight,
and I am no Charlton Heston
promising milk and honey,
but eighty ladybugs
sucked up in one day
in the vaccuum’s crevice attachment
and forty or more every day for weeks
is enough to give anyone the creeps,
make them long for an exodus of their own.
Graduate of the UNCG MFA program, co-editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review, and author of “Musings,” a weekly poetry column in Outlook, Scott Owens is the 2008 Visiting Writer at Catawba Valley Community College. His first full-length collection of poetry, The Fractured World, was published in August by Main Street Rag. He is also the author of two chapbooks–The Persistence of Faith (1993), from Sandstone Press, and Deceptively Like a Sound (Dead Mule, 2008). A third chapbook, The Book of Days, will be published by Dead Mule in January. Scott Owens’ poems have appeared in Georgia Review, North American Review, Poetry East, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Cimarron Review, Greensboro Review, Chattahoochee Review, Cream City Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Cottonwood, among others. Born in Greenwood, SC, he now lives in Hickory, NC, where he teaches and coordinates the Poetry Hickory reading series.
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