You hear stories: the ones where mothers 

love too much, fathers leave, and children 

turn into butterflies within the cold, empty walls. 

You pull the sleeves of your double-breasted 

coat over your hands, scowling. The world

is always yourself, and you believe in none of it.

It’s the 14th of March, and your body aches 

with the steady pulse of fever, dull and shivering; 

the nurse’s words are haphazard, distorted echoes—

the butterfly on your wall becomes a bald-headed ghost. 

A few days later, a scalpel snips the wrong tail tip, 

and you shudder to life, innards spilling 

like leeches after a flood. The nurse shrieks.

The summer you’re born from a cocoon, 

you’re 13 years old. The world is a scroll. 

Your eyes are wide, face purple. The nurse’s

screech gives way to a blare of white noise—

a chorus of claps and crinkles, a flock of birds, 

a soft rain, a rushing river, a pipe organ. 

A dissonant trumpetish thump you’re certain 

only the nurse’s heart makes. By 14, you’re 

old enough to fly. When you pass from this world 

to the next, 23 strings of butterfly hair pin you 

to heaven—the most you have ever kept at one time 

(four strands for each wing, plus one for every year 

of age and one for luck). You feel them tickle 

your thighs, the flutter in your ears within the air. 

You make your way to the west coast 

of the United States, silver and sunlike. 

The seagrass at both ends of the beach 

creaks with life, the wind of a drubbing rain. 

Vultures spill across the sky. A spark glows 

in the water: a harvest of offerings, 

soggy bills, a few strands of tulle, 

a decomposed offering. Wingbeats quicken, 

their movement slicing through gravity. 

You are now a butterfly, your snares a thousand 

leagues of the lies you claim. You are a fire, 

a ghost hidden in the ice, arson in words. 

You are compelled, instructed by your muse, 

the spreading apart, the folding together. 

In the eucalyptus trees on the California coast, 

you discover a contradiction worth believing in: 

a butterfly lost in the beating of wings.