butterfly garden

Lauren elaine Jeter

I.

My first real road trip is at age twenty-one

with my family, my last year with my maiden

name. We drive out to North Carolina,

where my parents hope to retire, to Asheville

and the mountains, and everything is blue

and green, and we can walk through clouds.

II.

As kids, we rode down to Galveston each year,

but that’s only a few hours away. We spent days

on the beach with family friends, swimming

in brown water and building wet sandcastles.

My brother’s hair was always white in the sun.

III.

My brother’s body is turning to vapor.

IV.

Soon, my life will be filled with the road;

when I marry, I’ll move to a town full

of trees in the east, and after a year

heavy with rain and green, I’ll move again

to the west coast, always a thousand miles

from home.

V.

We grew up in the same town my grandmother

was born in, the same town where she met my

grandfather and married him when she was

seventeen. She grew up so poor she didn’t know

the whole country was depressed. She remembers

snow seeping in through the wooden walls

of her home.

VI.

If our grandparents were snow, our mother was

tree—large pecans on the property she moved to

in her youth that took her breath away. Our father

was an artist, but we were recessive. They gave

birth to blue-eyed moths.

VII.

In North Carolina, we sit in a café in the clouds,

and the sky opens to blue mountains below.

We drive the Blue Ridge Parkway to its top.

When we come back down, we watch wide-eyed

as a bear rolls onto the freeway.

VIII.

Moths outnumber butterflies sixteen to one,

and we believed we were nothing special.

My brother’s body is turning to vapor like

the cigarettes he used to smoke. My brother

is my protector and my aggressor, and our

wings are speckled with sadness. My brother’s

disorder is psychosomatic, which means his

brain lies to his body. I want to tell him

that when you strip away organ and muscle

and bone, there is still something there,

fluttering. But my own fingers have cigarette

smell.

IX.

When I move to California, we’ll stand

in the Pacific with phytoplankton at our

feet, red with stench. Each break of a wave

will glow blue with bioluminescence.

Some people will see the sand light up

under their feet. But that is years away.

X.

My brother is a moth, waiting for the

hemolymph to pump through the veins

in his wings.

XI.

We shop along a river and laugh

and walk through botanical gardens

with plots of green bushes and purple

flowers. From above, I find that each

plot is a butterfly, and my brother

is drifting among them.

Lauren Elaine Jeter is an alumna of the Creative Writing program at Stephen F. Austin State University. She is the Co-Poetry Editor for Gingerbread House Literary Magazine and was most recently nominated for Best of the Net 2021 by the museum of americana, although her works have also appeared in Crab Creek Review, Gravel, and Thin Air, among other journals.