A broken tulip

there will be martyrs.

“Have you seen the moth?” “Yes.”

“It is dead.” “Yes.”

He trips over her staccato syllables,

the conversation slips. Shatters.

She saw it, self-injected into cold coils

of a bare light over the bath stall.

“You shiver. Are you cold?”  “No.”

It is a suicide scene in milk-glass curves,

over her green bathing bucket. She is afraid

of…. Well, but she sees not only the creature

she sees the bulb, an empty mask of energy,

stoic as the moth hung in the hug of death,

body at sharp angle skyward, prisoned by sleeping loops of bright.

Does a moth in daylight dread the unlit surface

as she, the stranger’s hand, the eye’s power?

Is the blaze of emotion a scintillation of fate?

She fears what she desires, luminous, searing delight spells

death, to swim through night air to find stars lit

just five feet over the earth is to ask for devouring, when did you forget it?