Eve and the Mosquitos by Carol Casey

The warm, damp day is flaunting this mosquito’s whine of tangible drama—life or death, blood or death, blood and death, blood and birth. If she bites and gets away, her line continues.

The females carry the burden. Sound familiar? They take the punishment for failure, mostly death. If they succumb to temptation—wrong place, wrong time, the judgement is swift and harsh. After all propagation is no joke. Ask the males who try to control it. Oh wait, I’m not talking about mosquitoes any more.

I wonder if there were mosquitos circling around Eve while she was talking to the snake, doing what they could, female to female, to wake her up. Maybe she swatted and they died. Maybe some survived to pass down the story of how they tried.

Maybe this mosquito, right now, is trying to wake me up.

But—to what?

Bio

Carol Casey lives in Blyth, Ontario. Her work has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Santa Fe Literary Review, Dust Poetry, antilang, Sublunary Review, Popshot Quarterly and others, including a number of anthologies, most recently, Up Your Ars Poetica (Peters and Driscoll) and Stones Beneath the Surface (Black Mallard Press). She has recently published her first collection—What Can Happen: Family and Other Raptures of Imperfection.

Author's note

This poem evolved while I was reflecting on how female mosquitos must have blood to propagate. They are such fragile creatures, so easy to crush, yet their imperative is to top us on the food chain, or die in the attempt. I was struck by the parallel between insect and human—in both cases the female takes the reproductive risks. While the mosquito’s situation is entirely biological, the human female’s predicament is exacerbated by social constructs. According to common interpretations of the Bible story, God punished Eve, and her female descendants, with painful, difficult childbirth and patriarchal male dominance. This justifies, to some, the double standard for sexual behaviour, the stigma placed on illegitimate pregnancy, the objectification of women, and more.

I enjoy entertaining the idea of mosquitos as messengers. Why else the annoying whine? They’d be more effective without it. Maybe we have something more to learn from them…