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.
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.
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