Tiny Wings
for Kathleen Cain
On a September morning two moths fold
their wings within the front door window curtain.
I place the jar kept for this purpose over them,
one at a time. They obligingly flutter inside
and I take them out to resume their journey
back to Nebraska.
At least, I think that’s where they’re going.
In the spring they migrate through Denver on their way
to the mountains. More go west than return east in the fall,
a routine outcome of the natural world.
Being my authority on all questions of the moon,
cottonwood trees, native flora and fauna, Kathleen could
verify this. In a neighborhood meeting on turning
the last farmland into a park, she once asked,
“May I say a few words on behalf of the prairie grasses?”
Kathleen’s in Nebraska now, seeing her baby sister through
to the end, an office older sisters should not hold.
My baby brother, born when I was ten, has been gone
more years than he lived. September’s the birth month
of that skinny child who ran to leap into my arms
when I came home from college.
It is an old sorrow, softened at the edges, tucked away.
Kathleen wipes her sister’s face with a warm cloth,
hugs her, talks to her, in Nebraska, where these moths want to go.
Being there is grief itself but also a blessing. My brother died alone:
that edge of my old sorrow still keen.
When I lift the jar lid, the moths fly out of sight in an instant,
though I marvel at how such tiny wings carry them so far—
so far and back again.
***
For the pretty girl screaming in my alley
You pace south to north, north to south
and I see you from my second story window
in glimpses between garages
but see enough to know your youth,
your slenderness, your long, red-tinted locs
pulled back tight in a high ponytail
that cascades down your back
and sways as you turn.
I see this, pretty girl,
when you pace north and turn south again.
I wouldn’t have seen you at all
were you not screaming into your phone,
causing me to rise from my desk.
At the top of your voice, you yell:
Why do you keep doing this to me?
Why do you keep doing this to me?
You know I love you.
You know I love you.
I hear your words because you repeat
everything half a dozen times
as you turn north or go back south.
I imagine going to the alley, telling you:
before you were born, I was with a man
of whom I asked that question,
over and again:
Why do you keep doing this to me?
Here’s what I know: He won’t change.
Hang up on him, pretty girl.
You could find someone else, someone
you wouldn’t have to scream at while pacing
my alley for forty minutes that seem forever.
But you won’t. I didn’t.
In your froth of hysteria, that’s the last thing
you need—an old white woman
appearing out of nowhere to tell you what to do.
Don’t tell me you don’t care,
don’t tell me you don’t care,
you scream and I nod—it may be years,
it may be never, until you realize,
this time, this one time,
he’s telling the truth.
***
Artists, Again
for Patti Bippus
On the flat roof the prickle
of sun-struck adobe wall warms my back.
Like the in and out of surf
caressing a pebbled shore,
wind in pines rises and falls,
chorused by Deer Creek’s run
through its elbowed path below.
On the far side of this valley,
aspens wink whitely in morning sun,
the smoky haze of their bare branches
marking a border between palomino pasture
and green pines climbing upslope.
A gang of ravens gabbles from tree to tree.
In the house, faint ticking of heat registers,
the greedy crackle of fire, and no word spoken
these several sweet hours since breakfast.
You sit at your easel in the sunbathed porch
and I do not look, knowing I would cover
this page should anyone approach,
protecting the fragility of work in progress:
what is not yet owned cannot yet be given.
When I climbed the spiral to the roof,
an angry buzzing increased.
The tower windows were full of flies
hatched from eggs laid in ceiling vigas.
Alarmed at my presence, they swirled
around me till I flung open the rooftop door,
and like so many pent-up ideas,
they burst into the blue.
Patricia Dubrava has two books of poems and one of stories translated from Spanish. She posts shortform creative nonfiction on her blog at www.patriciadubrava.com and Grandmother Poems at https://patriciadubrava.substack.com. Her translations of Mexican fiction have appeared in numerous journals including The Massachusetts Review. Translations of Ukrainian soldier stories appeared on Consequences (June 2023) and Asymptote (July 2023). Her poems appeared most recently in Bristlecone (March and September 2022).