Plants perennial, densely cespitose, 10-60 cm; rhizomes absent. Culms erect or spreading arching, linear filiform, terete, leafy toward base. Leaves overtopped by culm; blades ascending, filiform, 0.3-0.5 mm wide, margins deeply involute, then channeled, apex tri-gonous, setaceous. Inflorescences: spikelet clusters 1-2(-4), dense(-open), narrowly to broadly turbinate; branches capillary, variously elongate; leafy bracts setaceous, proximal exceeding clusters. Spikelets brownish, lance ellipsoid to fusiform, 2-2.5(-3) mm, apex acute; fertile scales broadly elliptic, 1.5 mm, apex narrowly rounded to broadly acute, apiculate, convex cupulate, midrib narrow, short excurrent or included. Flowers: perianth absent. Fruits 1-3 or more per spikelet, (0.6-)0.7-0.9(-1) mm; body pale, glassy, obovoid lenticular, 0.6-0.7 × 0.4-0.5 mm, margins narrow, wirelike; surfaces finely striate, very finely reticulate; tubercle button depressed triangular or patelliform, 0.1-0.15 mm, apiculate. Fruiting summer-fall or all year (south). Moist sands, peats, silts or clays of low meadows, bogs, flatwoods, sometimes seeps over calcareous rock; 0-300 m; Ala., Fla., Ga., La., Miss., N.C., S.C., Tex.; West Indies (Bahamas, Cuba, Dominican Republic); Central America.