Hellgrammite Cloud

By GARY METRAS

A cloud drifting over the house tonight
is the shape of an insect, a hellgrammite,
large, long, and singular, crawling through
the waters of dark sky. Its pincers as real
as anything as they search for sustenance,
another bug, a just hatched rainbow trout
wriggling in delicious currents along the belt
of Orion. It will munch its way through
this life, or the one imagined by star gazers
and fly fishermen, who are not so inseparable
from other dreamers in history
or in books. And when that bug of cloud
swam on by, its spiny abdomen of wispy
vapors like gill fringes breathing what is
offered, it left behind a moon as full and
round as a salmon egg, its shining imbued
with the DNA of survival and hope for all
species, insecta, star, and human alike.

Gary Metras is the author of Two Bloods: Fly Fishing Poems, which won the Split Oak Press Poetry Chapbook Award, and the long poem Francis d’Assisi 2008, which was a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award. His new book of poems, Captive in the Here, is due from Cervena Barva Press. He is the letterpress printer and editor for Adastra Press in Easthampton, Massachusetts.

[Purchase your copy of Issue 09 here.]

Hellgrammite Cloud

Related Posts

cover of HEIRLOOM

March 2025 Poetry Feature: Catherine-Esther Cowie’s Heirloom

CATHERINE-ESTHER COWIE
Her eye-less eye. My long / longings brighten, like tinsel, the three-fingered / hand. Ashen lip. To exist in fragments. / To exist at all. A comfort. / A gutting. String her up then, / figurine on the cot mobile. / And I am the restless infant transfixed.

Dispatches from Mullai Nilam, Marutha Nilam, and Neithal Nilam

VIJAYALAKSHMI
There is fire everywhere, / both inside and outside. / Unaware of the intensity of the fire, / they maintain silence / like the serenity of a corpse. / From the burning fire / bursts out a waterfall tainted in red. / All over the shores have bloomed / the flaming lilies of motherhood.

Gray Davidson Carroll's headshot next to the cover of The Common Issue 28.

Podcast: Gray Davidson Carroll on “Silent Spring”

GRAY DAVIDSON CARROLL
Poet Gray Davidson Carroll speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about their poem “Silent Spring,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. Gray talks about poetry as a way to witness and observe the world and how we experience it, and how it’s changing.