perched on the back of her hand as a small group of girls murmurs above,
incantatory, while a few say they’ve seen it before and walk away, though
I’m not one of them. I’d remember her rhubarb limbs and white chest
of fur, the yellow antennae curled like moonbeams around eyes mimicking
night’s black promise. This silken luck is reason enough to stay, and not
return to the field where men gather and discuss hard facts, like, it’s June
in Indiana. I’m tired of the beauty reclining as a mistress in front of me
while we pretend what’s important isn’t exactly this – that during her week
of adulthood a green stained-glass girl with one intact wing stumbled
over – who knows how she tore her pattern, if she could fly or not, if she
sought the salt of Evie’s hand or wanted for its sugar. When the sun opened
past the crown of our gathered heads, it cast its shadow through the tear
in the pastel tissue paper, binding us as experts of a delicate, crescent
knowledge. At last, we set the luna moth on a large aster, softened
into that brief glint which was her life.
Sloane Scott
Sloane Scott (they/them) is a nonbinary lesbian poet from Missouri. Their work has been published in Up the Staircase Quarterly and elsewhere. They are the founding editor of like a field, a seasonal journal of art and text.
