Album, and: To Kill A Deer, and: The Migration of Butterflies

ALBUM/ CarolFrost They will put the baby on your belly and you will feel from the white forehead to the ribs where the first sob, simply the lungs, will rise and along the arms to the wrists where the pulse-beats will be like movements of a bird head, the nerves on fast for this beginning, then look for the slope below the belly, simply the sex, and think in the heat of the afternoon how come something created of egg and sperm can so clarify the struggle to come together, then see in the baby's eyes a half-fictive blue candle held by a couple, simply the color of the eyes and the parents entering, without moving, the sequence of moments called now, permanent within the baby, that the brain fixes like the tilt of its chin, as if the entire life ahead were a gallery with so many walls, and you become like someone who asking for meaning will think simply of the pictures, this one, this one. The Missouri Review · 13 TO KILL A DEER / CarolFrost Into the changes of autumn brush the doe walked, and the hide, head and ears were the tinsel browns. They made her. I could not see her. She reappeared, stuffed with apples, and I shot her. Into the pines she ran, and I ran after. I might have lost her, seeing no sign of blood or scuffle, but felt myself part of the woods, a woman with a doe's ears, and heard her dying, counted her last breaths like a song of dying, and found her dying. 1 shot her again because her eyes were open, and her lungs rattled like castenets, then poked her with the gun barrel because her eyes were dusty and unreal. I opened her belly and pushed the insides like rotted fruit into a rabbit hole, skinned her, broke her leg joints under my knee, took the meat, smelled the half-digested smell that was herself. Ah, I closed her eyes. I left her refolded in some briars with the last sun on her head like a benediction, head tilted on its axis of neck and barren bone; head bent wordless over a death, though I heard the night wind blowing through her fur, heard riot in the emptied head. 14 · The Missouri Review THE MIGRATION OF BUTTERFLIES / CarolFrost The green forest lanes that end in the Mexican mountains are strewn with monarch butterflies this March: where the lanes end, evergreens are covered in yellow layers. Alone, can you see these monuments, vast as Stonehenge, and not think of June's ticker-tape parade beating north, and those fallen along the way like a trail of colorful bits left there by someone gone in the woods too far and never come back? In oblivion, a wind with its light hands can scatter several of the butterflies, as a sleeping pensioner can brush away the small flies from his face, shift, and still sleep. The chilled monarchs spiral down, calm as spring showers of snowflakes . Too cold to wake them now! The monuments, dear-achieved, stand under a changing sky where sunlight stirs in its time all the resting butterflies. For some the awakening is early, for others late. The Missouri Review · is ...