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Mourning cloak butterfly

Two Poems by Eben E. B. Bein

The Source

for 天野
 

Early summer.
Under park trees
a Mourning Cloak butterfly
flickers an ellipse
over the sunlit patch of grass
where you are laid out, reading
where I am watching you read
your shoulder, your being turned
to the page. It settles beside you
like your notebook
—open, forgotten.

You are a statue with hair
a breeze runs fingers through,
still as a word
I could peer into for life.

The wind starts gently
to turn the pages of your notebook up
onto your elbow: one, two,
catching on a blank page
what will be written there
and onward. It’s all unfolding
the future building against your arm.
It flutters but does not leave.

I vow to stare into the source with you—
hold it open—never look away.

Wings, thin as paper, shiver.
Stay.

  
Forthcoming in Love Is for All of Us: Poems of Tenderness and Belonging from the LGBTQ+ Community and Friends.

 

  

Angel of Rorschach

Plecoptera nymphs graze in the benthic zone of rivers and lakes for up to 4 years before emerging. Adults live a few days to weeks. Presence indicates well-oxygenated, unpolluted waters.
 

You—a stonefly splayed in the film of the shallows
    still, beyond struggle—
            await the gilled mouth of God

wings make a sky-top cross, cast amber halos
    down on the rocky town
            of your adolescence,

a blurred symmetry of wings passing
    over streets and gardens
            where once you scraped among your people

never knowing what anyone would see
    in you, wings folded away
            until the day they split from the back
    and you rose, beat them
beautiful against your moment

then fell, Angel of Rorschach, back
    to the human plane
            where nobody could

ever pin you down, just gravity
    pulling your wings
            all the way open

 

  

     

Eben E. B. BeinEben E. B. Bein (he/they) is a biology-teacher-turned-climate-justice educator, activist, and multidisciplinary artist. They were a 2022 Fellow for the Writing By Writers workshop and winner of the 2022 Writers Rising Up “Winter Variations” poetry contest. Their poems can be found in the likes of PINCH, Nimrod Journal, New Ohio Review, or in their chapbook Character Flaws (Fauxmoir lit, 2023) which explores judgment in intimate relationships. They currently live on Pawtucket land (Arlington, Massachusetts) with their husband, where they are completing their first full-length collection about parent-child conflict, healing, and love. Find them at ebenbein.com or @ebenbein.

Original header photo of mourning cloak butterfly by Mary Ellen St. John, courtesy Wikimedia. Photo of Eben E. B. Bein by Matthew Cavanaugh Photography.

 

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