On the Time It Takes to Fire Thirty Rounds from an AR15
2 Minutes Read Time
Text:
One hundred and sixty-five wingbeats from a ruby-throated hummingbird. Nearly six / hundred from that same hummingbird in front of a perched female. Two hundred / and seventy from a ladybug, or thirty less from a monarch butterfly. / Only fifteen from a swallowtail butterfly, loping when compared / to other insects, but it gets the job done. Five hundred and / forty beats from a bumblebee. Almost one thousand / from an ordinary housefly. An incredible / eighteen hundred from a mosquito / creating that ubiquitous buzz, / but glacial compared to a / midge at more than / three thousand / wing / beats or / the ivory-billed / woodpecker, which is / recorded at more than eight beats / per second, so twenty-four, give or take, / per two-point-uncertain-decimal seconds, repeating. / Fifty-one for a bat at dusk, of course, it’s dusk here and / the truth is I began writing this poem the last time this happened. / And when I say this, that unspecific demonstrative pronoun that points so / carelessly at the ladybug crawling along my hand or the butterfly on our porch, / it’s because I can’t bring myself to say what else this stands for. Because it’s dusk and night / comes with wings, or cape; simple shroud or sickly pall that seems to swallow all of these things
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