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.