MATTHEW J. SPIRENG

Bug

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2024: VOL. 39.

For only a moment it seems
there is movement at the bottom
of the page, as if an insect
is crawling across the paper
in the thick book of poems—“New
and Complete”—I am reading with

increasing pleasure as the poet matures
and becomes slightly less quirky—just
slightly—than when he began. And
maybe it isn’t even that, maybe he’s
just as quirky as he was when he wrote
decades ago, but has gotten better

at his craft. Whatever. But for
a moment I’m distracted from one
of his later poems by what appears to be
an insect moving at the bottom of
the page, but is not—is just
the page number dancing at the edges

of sight. And what is the page number,
you ask, as if I wrote this and stopped
reading and can go back and look. But
I can’t. You see, I wrote a first draft
that ended before this, with the word
sight, then picked up the book and read

more, so the page number, as with much
of what we observe, is permanently
lost other than that I can assure you
it was three numbers starting with a
3. It would be fitting if it was 300, which
appears a bit insect-like, but I’m sure

it wasn’t that. It was just three numbers
starting with 3, greater than 300,
but less than the insect I thought.

Matthew J. Spireng’s 2019 Sinclair Poetry Prize-winning book Good Work was published by Evening Street Press.  A 12-time Pushcart Prize nominee, he is the author of two other full-length poetry books, What Focus Is and Out of Body, winner of the 2004 Bluestem Poetry Award, and five chapbooks.