I have learned to hold things light
with my hands open enough
as if what I were holding
were a bird, and she could still
fly away. I wasn’t always
this way. Once I hurt a butterfly,
trying to hold her, my fingers
coated in a powder that felt
important, that felt in me: sudden, deep—
foreboding. I was not an easy child.
Small things hurt my mind. My mother
might say my heart, but really, for so long
it was the whole of me that ricocheted
as I moved through the world. So I was taught
not to heed or bear much weight
in my own reflection. Most of the time
my bad eyesight like cotton wool,
like distance. Once, some boys in the neighborhood
tied a large moth to a small stake,
with a twist tie severing its abdomen—
I threw up, screamed as if a person
was being burned. And still, even now,
I know the way a fox might lie for days
like she’s sleeping beside the fog line
on the road to my son’s school, the way
her ears still catch like they are pricking
even as the body as a whole is collapsed,
the way I say out loud: come
vultures, do your work, tend
this poor thing. 
 

—Rebecca Brock

Poet’s Website, Instagram

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