Pearl Crescent · Kendall Lake

Cuyahoga’s Collar of Dissent 2020

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by Monica Kaiser

in memoriam Ruth Bader Ginsberg

I am cocooning,
& visualizing butterflies
to escape the dying,

the images
of people with tubes
down their throats.

A global diseasing.

Mother keeps warning.
Mother keeps warming.

I am guilty of climate genocide,
even as I fell in love
     with you, pearl crescent.
Even as I watched
     natural laws govern you,
summer after summer,
the continual reinvention
of yourself—
a finale of flames
puddled on wet ground,
an otherworldly orange.

Language-like,
your pigments & patterns
are fluid, vary state to state,
region to region. Your pearls
are persistent, rebellious by nature.
One by one,
you flitter, disperse.
Heavenwards,
out of sight. Down to open meadows,
to the throats & tubes
of flowers. Petal posers.
Wings open. Wings close.

Your proboscis sips the nectar’s
sweetness, as tiny spiracles allow air
into your tracheal tubes.

Systems are necessary for survival—
as is your courtship chase,
a possible fluttering, a coupling,
a joining of abdomens: copulation.

I, too, am a reinvention—
a dynamic energy
sheltering inside a bulldozed tree
as it snows,
as our gas furnace heats,
as our curtains shiver in its air,
as I visualize butterflies
& reimagine you & your
hindwing’s crescent pearls
quivering at the collar
of every
star.

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Traveling Stanzas community arts projects bring poetry to people’s everyday lives through innovative methods and digital platforms.