My Dad brought me back a Blue Morpho pressed
in a black shadow box after returning from his mission
in Guyana in 1978. I was 10 & obsessed with catching
Monarchs & Swallowtails in my backyard.
Waited for them to pass in jelly jars shelved in my carport.
I can still feel their fairy dust on my fingertips
& they were fresh & I was careful how I spread
their wings so they wouldn’t break,
how I made sure their corpses were centered,
how I held my specimens under their thoraxes
& gently inserted the pins, how I created the illusion
that they still floated—
When I pulled them from a container in my basement
yesterday, they emerged uglier than I remembered:
Wings frayed, antennae askew, guts leaking on burlap
& I killed so many without remorse.
I remember watching Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News
& the shots of the rainforest & the reports of Kool-Aid
in little Dixie Cups & the people face down
on the ground & I was supposed to feel something
but I didn’t understand what a massacre meant & I was spared
the details of how Dad flew all the bodies back from Jonestown
& I saved the Morpho & its remains still shimmer–
I didn’t realize that its undersides were brown, that it was never blue.
