Below ground, Baby,
you slept for 17 years
under the knotted tunnels
of beetles, under
formicaries of ants–
your childhood labyrinths.
A maple root’s circuitry
fed you, straw to stomach.
Though I lived it, too,
I am amazed at how
a body in the dark
knows when to molt.
You did it four times,
then dug upward
to meet the Sun, to daywalk.
(On number five)
your chitinous husk,
a hollowed, legged mold,
clings to the side of the house.
I see the split in the shell,
the crack you crawled out of—
as an orange-veined,
compound, red-eyed,
mouthless, adult.
How alien do you feel
above ground?
Off in the distance
your lovers sing.
You have only weeks—
to find a match,
learn to line dance,
balance chemical
equations, graduate
cum laude, to clumsily
fly toward
the buckling of his ribs
in tymbals, each
click-upon-a-click builds
summer night sine waves,
congregations of sound.
Oh, early June, now!
I wish I had the time
to teach you, Baby, the meaning
of transient, of tenacious,
of evanescent, of biology’s
planned obsolescence for us—
before your see-through
wings unfurled, as your black body
tilted back, hung from its shell,
before you left the house, before
hindlegs hinged open—
Baby, we were never built to love.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 27, Issue 2.
Claudine R. Moreau was born near Michigan’s Saginaw Bay, but was raised in the coal mining country of southwestern Pennsylvania. She is the author of Demise of Pangaea (Main Street Rag 2024) and Dark Machines (Fugitive Poets Press 2012). Now residing in North Carolina, Moreau teaches physics and astronomy at Elon University. Her work has appeared in Chaotic Merge, The Pinch, PANK, and Tar River Poetry, among others.
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