Moth
Morgan Christie
After J. Robert Lennon’s ‘Owl’
Her daughter refused to collect the eggs
from the barn because there was a bat
her daughter said
fluttering around in there; so she kissed her teeth,
grabbed the wicker basket, and trudged across
the dewy grass and through the dawn
lightened door, only to see that her daughter
was right, there was something there, not
a bat, she realized as the flying thing lunged
just above her head and then settled on top
of the broken mold ridden stool leaning
against the barn wall – it wasn’t a bat
but a large brown moth, its wings highlighted
in darker brown ovals in a fruitless scuffle
dusted in angst as it attempted to penetrate
the softly lit glass. It’s scared, she thought, scared
and confused, so she set the wicker basket down and
carefully took hold of the moth in her hands
preparing to set it free through the half-open door and
she would have done so had the moth not began to flap
its big brown wings with slightly jagged
edges and scratched her palms and said, in a low, suffocated sound
like a sick old blues singer
I’m not lost or scared and I’m not a moth
either
I’m the part of your daughter you don’t understand, and
I fight against the glass not because I want to break free
but because I need to know how it feels; and while the moth’s
short speech made her hesitate
she soon continued across the barn to the now opened door and
released the moth into the morning sun, because she knew it was
all she could do and because it scared her to hold such a thing in her hands
then she went back across the dewy grass and into the house and
took her daughter by the hand and walked her to the barn; she
picked up the wicker basket then passed it to her before she knelt
down and took hold of one of them in her hands to show her
daughter that it was safe enough to collect the eggs.
Morgan Christie's work has appeared in Room, Aethlon, Moko, Obra/Artifact, Blackberry, BLF Press, as well as others, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poetry chapbook Variations on a Lobster's Tale was the winner of the 2017 Alexander Posey Chapbook Prize (University of Central Oklahoma Press, 2018) and her second poetry chapbook Sterling was released last year (CW Books, 2019). She is the winner of the 2018 Likely Red Fiction Chapbook contest, and her first full-length short story manuscript These Bodies will be published by Tolsun Publishing in 2020.