The Moth Teachings

Kelly Gray

 

I. raising actias luna
The trick is not to let the caterpillars die.
You are already calling them baby.

Baby, come here, don’t drown yourself, yet.
Baby, eat this, I crawled under two fences to bring you this tree.

Your supplies do not equal their weight in transformation~
black netting, armfuls of persimmon

and sumac branch,
glass bottles, tin foil.

Body eats body.
One day, a monster. Furred. Not yet unfurled.

You mistake it for mutation. Scoop it up with gloved hands.
You never knew how to wait.

Trying to make everything grow, then die.
You have thrown it in the trashcan

before you notice.
The other moths are born alone,

you on your knees,
digging out the tint of moon green from the week’s meals.
 

II. ceanothus
They say insects have no feelings, no nerves. As proof,
                they will continue to mate or eat while a bird is feeding on their body.

You read the statistics. You ration
                death, charts, one article. Draw a line. On this side,

you are a conservationist,
                champion of the native nocturnal. On this side,

you are carefully placing bodies in glass bins, sealing
                the lid. They flutter, dust smudging. Baby, you say,

sliding the bin into the freezer. You close the door. Open it again.
                Your sentence unfinished.

You look around for a someone feeding on you. Perhaps a leg lost
                inside a throat, maybe up to your shoulder in swallow.

You remove their bodies from the freezer, carefully insert thin pins
                through their thorax, tape their wings into place.

Seeing this, a woman refers to you as a murderer on social media.
                She does not understand how your body has no feeling,

she cannot see the markers of tape beneath your arms.
                The way the birds came for you.
 

III. salver cecropia
A delicate crawl across collarbone. Your neck,
an ascent. Small legs along your scalp

line. Crescent blood marked wings. Mouthless,
they tell no story. You in repose beneath the trees

as the forest goes dark. They thought you were mother.
You have brought them to the night. Above, each bat starts

as a looping silhouette against ink sky, then dives down,
plucking insects from your body. Mouthless, they do not cry.

You had only wanted to be close
to their death, to find your body a platter

served to the dome of black as you lay alone.
Mouthless.

 
 

Kelly Gray (she/her) is the author of Instructions for an Animal Body (MoonTide Press, 2021) My Fingers are Whales and other stories of Cetology (Moon Child Press, 2021), and Tiger Paw, Tiger Paw, Knife, Knife (forthcoming from Quarter Press, 2022). Her writing has recently appeared or will be appearing in Passages North, Harbor Review, Menacing Hedge, Driftwood Press, Under a Warm Green Linden, and elsewhere.