All in by Victoria Nordlund

by Victoria Nordlund

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.

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Victoria Nordlund's poetry collection, Wine-Dark Sea, was published by Main Street Rag in 2020. She is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize Nominee, whose work has appeared in PANK Magazine, Rust+Moth, Chestnut Review, trampset, Pidgeonholes, and elsewhere. Visit her at VictoriaNordlund.com.