The Scientist and Her Husband Observed the Consciousness of Gnats in Spoleto, Italy

Nothing but a blur of brevity. She saw it first.
He tried to capture it—lens-click—still a cloud

of nothing. They’d been sitting on the wall outside
the duomo at early dusk, talking about spending

their last stage of life in a foreign country. To die
here, where the light of the old masters’ brushes

washed the stucco, the cobblestones, their faces.
The small flies arrived. Each frenzied gnat created

the larger, slower shape of a moon in-the-making.
The males moved as swarms do—with one mind

to attract females who would only join
the churning mass to mate. The mundane

ghost-bodies spun, wings backlit by the sun’s
last bone-colors of the ancient.

The gnats would live for hours, at the most
a few days, coded to cheat death by breeding.

The couple vowed to be reborn for a chance
of another lifetime together in this fortress town

where long ago, Etruscans divined the future
by gazing into a goat’s liver. The two watched

in silence. Rising above the duomo piazza,
the flies swelled into a thousand prayers.

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Jo Brachman holds an MFA in Writing from Pacific University in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in Cimarron Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Cortland Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Bellingham Review, Moon City Review, Terminus Magazine, Poet Lore, Birmingham Review, Comstock Review, San Pedro River Review, Best New Poets, Tar River, and others. A 2022 Fulbright Scholar, she recently finished a research grant in the Special Collections Archives of Lund University in Lund, Sweden.