Every mile or two, the wipers have to come on, and not because of rain. Dave Bonta's poem starts with a small, practical annoyance, a driver clearing a windshield, and slowly lets it grow into something much larger. The title helps. "Ephemeroptera" is the scientific name for the mayfly order, and it joins the Greek for "lasting a day" with the word for "wing." So before the first line we already know that the subject is brevity.
The opening sentence is plain and almost chatty, but one phrase lifts it: "the off-white inkblots of their anonymous deaths." The insects have become smears on glass, and the word "inkblots" does two things at once. It makes the dead mayflies look like writing, or like a Rorschach card that asks the reader what they see. Then "anonymous" pulls the other way. Each mayfly is one of countless identical casualties, and the wipers erase them as casually as they would raindrops. The repeated "every mile or two" gives the sentence the steady rhythm of the wipers themselves, a mechanical sweep of small deaths.
Then the poem turns on a single word: "Imagine." The speaker stops describing and starts empathizing. The long second sentence tells the mayfly's story as a compressed drama. "Arrested development" is a phrase we usually apply to people who haven't grown up, and here it is oddly literal: a creature held in a larval state, then given everything at once. The sentence moves in a cascade of verbs, "growing wings, breathing air, and mating just once," each one a huge change that gets only a few syllables. Then comes the sting at the end. The mayfly has "gained reproductive parts in exchange for the loss of a mouth." The word "exchange" makes life sound like a bargain, and the sentence closes on "a mouth," the plainest image of appetite, taken away. The prose has no rhyme and no strict meter. Its force comes from long, breathless syntax that mimics the rush of that single day.
The last three lines shift form. Their short, unrhymed lines and seasonal marker, "spring again," are close to haiku, and a prose paragraph followed by a brief verse is the pattern of a haibun. The gap between the two parts does the poem's quietest work. The haiku never mentions mayflies, yet the first line places them: spring is when they swarm, and the cycle begins again. Against that, the speaker is "scheduling," a word that belongs to calendars and appointments, to a life with a future that can be planned. The mayfly gets one day and no time to plan. The human gets a "first Covid shot," and the word "first" implies there will be a second, and more days after.
The Covid reference is the poem's only direct signal of its moment, and judging by it, the poem comes from the period when vaccines were being rolled out. That context invites further readings, though the poem never insists on them. The pandemic year can feel like "arrested development," a life held in suspension. The phrase "breathing air" and the loss of a "mouth" may echo a time of masks and fears about breath. The vaccine appointment then becomes a modest transformation of the speaker's own, a hoped-for emergence.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It could have announced a lesson about mortality, but it lets a smeared windshield and a booked appointment sit side by side and trusts the reader to feel the connection. The tone is wry and tender rather than solemn. The mayflies are not simply tragic, since their short life is dense with change, and the human, though safer, is left with the quieter question of how to use the time that scheduling assumes we have.