LADYBUG
ALM No.95, November 2026
POETRY
Walking under the Moon in Late August
Come see the moon Pam said
I stopped what I was doing
and stepped outside with her
the night was thick with crickets
There was a solitary figure on the dark street
Is that you Bill she said
Are you meeting us for our walk I said
No said Mary I just happened to be here
but I’ll walk with you if you like
We could see the moon just coming
up through the trees, two days short of full
but it could have been full. As we started to walk,
we spoke of the Lyme’s Mary contracted in Portugal
and of my sudden double vision on the Pike
We all talked of the movie The Odyssey, our likes
and dislikes, and how the meddlesome, cunning
Olympian gods are essential to the story
When we came to the top leg of the crescent
we saw the moon had cleared the trees
trailed and blurred by a wisp of cloud like framed
Victorian prints once seen on the walls
of dark wall-papered parlors with lace curtains, in which
the moon was half-obscured by clouds as it hung low
in the west, next to lamps with hanging crystal teardrops,
As we walked into the crescent Mary told us about Julie,
a woman in her eighties who lived by herself in a big house
whom Mary was hired to be with for a few hours
How Julie told her she had an amulet with special powers
would you try it out on me Mary asked her
Julie said lie down and held the amulet hanging
from a golden chain over different places on Mary’s body
Julie kept her hand still while the amulet swung wildly
Mary felt a tingling and said Is it good for your health
Julie said it lets you know how good you are
Mary said Where did you get this amulet
the woman said I can’t remember
We came to the lower leg of the crescent
we saw the unclouded moon shining on our faces
Our thoughts of Odysseus and the Reiki master
engulfed by moon and crickets.
Tamping Down the Brio
My sister-in-law’s ex husband is Uncle Sam.
The striped pants go well with his long legs
as he leads the marching band in a spontaneous parade
But the Old Glory fresco on the brick wall is fading
and no one’s come along to touch it up.
There’s a subliminal PSA reminding us that maybe
we shouldn’t be so crazy-happy just because
the old man’s dead and his acolytes are mostly in the
hoosegow but even if every one of those malefactors meets
their comeuppance, the AI at Delphi just released her Two-
Age forecast calling for Earth to reach four thousand
degrees Fahrenheit at the surface, making it
uninhabitable to all life, with a bunch of very,
very pale white people in a bunker beneath the crust
sitting in a large lecture hall with lots of whiteboard
and a speaker who drones on about the miracle of technology
that lets them live, and how the One who is and was
and is to come is a Capitalist. So, until Oracle loses its place
on the leaderboard, Majorettes, let’s not have
those leg kicks quite so high.
Ladybug
Lucas, kneeling, squatting or sitting. Looking at tiny things in his backyard, then playing with mad energy, pickup soccer or field hockey with his sister, friends, neighbors. When he isn’t competing, he is looking, examining, quiet. A readiness to run, kick or glide might be displaced by whatever he hold s in his palm, requring stillness.
One day I wake up to my wife When are you going to take the car? I look at her without expression until I remember I have an appointment to take my car to get the air conditioning charged. I go downstairs, look out on the deck and see the micro-fibre cloths that I clean my glasses with have blown off the railing, after I had washed them and put them out in the sun to dry. I get down into the bushes and find them, mostly.
I take the car to the repair shop and leave the fob in the lock box. Coming home,
I see I have left the fob for my wife’s car at the shop. I drive her car back and exchange it with the mechanic, who by this time has already opened the lock box.
Brushing my teeth, I see something crawling out of the sink drain. It’s a ladybug. I wonder what it was doing down there. Slowly but without pause it comes up the side of the sink until it reaches the rim where it recedes from my view. I’m beginning to wonder if I should slide a card to help it come up over the top when I see a pair of front forelegs pulling ladybug up and over the rim. I take the insect outside and place it on the concrete. It opens and closes its carapace-like elytra to let the sun dry out its delicate wings. It has come from damp darkness to a place in the summer sun.
I go over to Lucas out in his yard and ask him if he’d like to see something I found in my sink. As he follows me back he says I don’t think I can go into the house Surprised to hear a note of fear in his voice, I tell him about the darkness it came from, perhaps once in a larval stage.. He picks it up. Careful I say, but he is careful. He looks at it closely, then says I’ll put it in my bucket in a casual way I hadn’t expected. HHHHe has brought his bucket with his many treasures; now the ladybug is one more.
At noon the mechanic calls. You need a new compressor he says. $1500. I tell him I’ll pass. That night I go to Parcel 5 to hear the RPO and get stung on the ear by a wasp again and again.
They’re called ladybugs because farmers in the Middle Ages thanked Our Lady for sending the little bugs with spots on their wings who devoured the pests who threaten their crops, after they prayed to her by name.
But the insect who crawled out of my sink pays no more attention to that handle today than it did those centuries before, so furiously was it committed to its task.
Bring me my bow of burning gold
bring me my arrows of desire
bring me my spear O clouds unfold
bring me my Chariots of fire
Unsolicited
Old man with scraggly gray beard outside Wegmans
talking with a woman. I thought he was going in,
but she walks away and he speaks in a soft voice as I pass,
You wouldn’t have some change, would you? I say I might.
He says these people are assholes, not unkindly but like
you might remark on what bad weather we’re having.
I give him a 10, my smallest bill. God bless you, sir.
His speech suggests he is not used to this role. As I go in,
a man in black is coming out. I turn to look but the old man
does not stay to palaver. I do my shopping quick and
distracted in a store designed around
not having panhandlers hassling incomers.
The chain picks its sites accordingly
but sometimes you need muscle.
Mia checks me out. She has a couple of piercings which
do not blemish her calm cinnamon face. She looks at me
through clear eyes and asks me how are you? I say
I’m fine, how are you? and she says good with presence and
intent. We are both speaking in code, telling each other
we are here.
The chain wanted full markup.
A few amenities for $82.22
The old man had offered a soon-to-expire
Shoppers Club special.
I leave, boomer muzak pouring down like sleet,
barcodes and lasers beeping as predators lurk in the next
bend of this dirty pristine river at self checkout
where I could have gotten stuck on single vision,
out to the parking lot
where consumers now, unsolicited, run to the trough
Poet, fiction writer, storyteller, and former Assistant Editor for Narrative Magazine for eleven years. William Pruitt has published stories and poems in such places as Kestrel, The Adelaide Literary Journal, BlazeVOX, Ploughshares, Anderbo.com, Cottonwood. et. al, and has published eight books of fiction and poetry. His core values for poetry are clarity, the musical rhythms of natural speech and the engagement of language in the expression of authentic feeling.
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