my florida mother a menagerie at 89
- my florida mother a menagerie at 89
the giant locust on the window screen its chitinousabdomen segmented in armored plates of toughnesspulsing as it clings for days or else the narrow darklizard in the too-deep bowl and we don’t know if it’sthe color blue the coolness that has attracted it but it staysand we wonder because we don’t know if it’s trappedby sides too steep but when we return the slender-slenderis gone or has become the pale scorpion runningfrom us as we open the door running into the house so thatwe hurry to stomp on it before it finds a place to hideor else to sting and we step on it hard again againand it is want-and-don’t-want wait-and-don’t-waitgusto whittled to a faltering step and oh the fallingtrapped in the butterfly house where migration ends infaded colors and crunch of wings and terrible heavy feet [End Page 606]
mary jo firth gillett’s collection, Soluble Fish, won the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. She has also published four prize-winning chapbooks, most recently Dance Like a Flame, which won the 2013 Hill-Stead Sunken Garden Museum Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review.
