A wasp seizes a locust in midair, paralyzes it, drags it to the ground and lays its eggs inside the body, which stays alive to feed the young. Q.R. Quasar's "History of Screams, No. 4: The Last Scream of a Locust" starts as a cold piece of natural observation. In its final stanza it turns on the reader. The poem is about how suffering reproduces itself, and its central claim is that pain, once inflicted, behaves like a parasite: it nests, feeds and hatches in someone new.
The poem is built on a pair of parallel stanzas. The third describes the wasp's life cycle, and the fourth repeats its grammar with screams as the subject. "The larvae eat the locust alive" becomes "screams eat you alive." Wasps "crawl out the locust's carapace," while screams "crawl under your skin." The verbs match, but the direction is reversed: the wasps burst outward from a body, whereas the screams burrow inward into one. The most unsettling line is "new screams cry out your mouth." Here the scream is both the victim's voice and the offspring, a larva that leaves through the throat. The pronoun shift to "you" is the poem's trap. For three stanzas we watch an insect from a safe distance, and then the distance is gone.
Quasar's diction is carefully chosen. "Harrows" suggests agony, since "harrowing" is a common word for distressing experiences, but a harrow is also a farm tool that rakes soil. The sound of the locust is therefore imagined as something that tills the listener's ears, and "clawed" makes the eardrums into flesh. Domestic and protective words are bent into horror. A "cocoon" should be a place of safe transformation, but here it is a "living cocoon," and the locust becomes "a nest for eggs." "Carapace" is a cold, clinical word for the locust's armor, and it sits strangely beside the screaming. "Borne down" is slightly formal and carries a sense of burden, as if the locust were being carried to an altar.
The form is as bare as the vocabulary. There is no rhyme, and the poem is written in lowercase free verse with almost no punctuation. The sentences are flat statements in the present tense, so nothing in the telling slows down or comforts. The one exception is the trailing ellipsis in "the cycle repeats itself. . ." which seems to hang the thought in the air. Meanwhile the refrain does the work that rhyme usually does. "Going on and on" appears in the first stanza, and "the screams go on and on" ends both of the last two, with "the cycle repeats itself" just before it. The repetition is monotonous on purpose, so the reader feels the thing it describes. The second stanza is only three lines long and moves quickly from the ground to the injection of the eggs. Its brevity makes the act seem quick and routine, and what follows is much longer.
The title adds another layer of irony. This is "the last scream of a locust," yet the poem insists that the scream is never last. It outlives the insect and returns, in the final stanza, in "you." "History" in the title suggests something larger than a single event, and the numbering ("No. 4") hints, as an inference, that this is one entry in a longer series about screams. The poem does not say whose screams are meant, which leaves it open to many readings: trauma, abuse, violence handed down through generations, or the way anxiety and fear spread from person to person.
The poem is significant because it declines to moralize. The wasp is not a villain, since it is simply following its nature, and the poem offers no rescuer and no end to the cycle. Its horror is the sense of inevitability, and its power comes from a simple, almost scientific description that then rewrites the reader as the host.