OPEN LETTERS
An Open Letter to a Dead Lanternfly
We’re kind of sorry for your loss.
Dear Spotted Lanternfly,
This spotted lanternfly/sitting here in mid-July/is looking for/something
was the terrible poem I was scrawling out when Brett walked up, reared back, and smushed you.
“Lanternfly!” He howled. Looked down at you. “They’re invasive, you know.”
Smushed. Smashed. Crushed. One moment, you were here, a spotted, saucer-shaped creature bobbing your head, calculating if you should summit my forearm or turn around. I was drawing you. You look so weird, even by insect standards.
I know you have never seen Star Wars, but I must say that you look just like this creatural singer in the old movies.
Anyways. The next moment, you were all yellow guts and crushed exoskeleton.
I can’t blame Brett. I mean, come on. Your picture is all over town.
“Spotted Lanternfly: Stop the invader!” Some signs read.
You’re an international war criminal.
Sure, you could argue that we’re invaders too. Did the Lenni Lenape ask William Penn to start rummaging around on the Schuylkill? Did generational Italians of South Philly ask for electric scooters at the corner of every dive bar selling 1-liter bowls of blue-vodka to white college students?
So what. I still wanted to kill you. Should’ve killed you. By all environmental standards, you need to be squashed.
But it was just you and I at the picnic table. It was like two soldiers meeting outside of their platoon, soldiers in a war neither of us are all that committed to. Yes, you might someday help defoliate the willow tree in our yard. But right now, well, you’re just climbing on my thumb.
I was looking at you, and you were looking back at me.
You were alive — beyond what I expect form insects. Making distinctions, calculating the odds, looking for an escape rout. Watching you, I found myself again in the presence of an inordinately conscious creature.
Every encounter I have like this, I hear Scott Russell Sanders talking in my head. In his essay, “Buckeye”, he writes when he heard a hawk screeching and knew that it was his deceased father.
“The voice of my education told me then and tells me now…that I merely projected my longing onto a bird. My education may well be right; yet nothing I heard in school, nothing I’ve read, no lesson reached by logic has ever convinced me as utterly or stirred me as deeply as did that red-tailed hawk.”
Because when Brett came up and yelled, “Lanternfly!”, stopped, reared back and slapped the shit out of you, it was as though someone had just turned out the light in a room. I sat there for a moment, stunned, before walking back inside.
For a brief moment, in your last moment, I like to think that we ignored our allegiances to our species, and existed just as animals. Animal — animal. Human — insect. Young man — lanternfly. You and I.
Sincerest apologies,
Your local hypocrite
