Middle age is a drawer of bottles,
labels rubbed blank,
small tablets stamped
with numbers I can’t read,
others chalk-white,
anonymous as bones.

That August night I woke,
a moth in the moonlight,
wings two halves of a Viking ship.
They say if it maps all four corners
you’re finished.
My head bricked with mucus,
her throat raw-
our marriage a duet
two instruments coughing through the score.

I whispered- moth,
as her eyes opened, glowing like sunken lanterns.
It weighed two thousand pounds,
wings lifting her hair
like a bride of the dead.

Two optimism pills
waited on my table.
I chewed them dry,
chalk cementing my tongue,
the insect’s brain ticking in my skull
like a clock in a gothic castle.

Then water rose inside us-
first a seep, then a tide,
spilling warm rivers across the floorboards.
The dark room brightened green,
cypress arms cracked plaster,
reeds whispered spells older than fever.

Fireflies stitched lanterns along the walls,
crocodiles slid through like priests of the river.
We held hands as the bed turned pirogue,
drifting through brackwater green.

Above us the moth circled-
no longer omen but guide,
its wings stirring moonlight into spell.
Papa Legba opened the crossing,
Maman Brigitte lit the reeds with flame.
We: two elders slipping from sickness into swamp,
breath turned to whirlpools,
our oaths ferried
on the moth’s traité tide.

How can I have loans to pay,
when i can't even find a way,
to keep my guts from spilling out?

How can I save each bug,
So many small holes dug,
Where do I get little gravestones?

He came from shade but dreamt of sun,
A silent thing with wings too small.
Each morning found him halfway gone—
Each night he broke his quiet fall.

He watched the sky, its golden thread,
And thought it meant to pull him in.
His mother warned, “You’ll end up dead,”
But still he tried, again and again.

He reached, though thinner grew the air,
And stars, he thought, would answer back.
But they just watched him drifting there—
A speck upon a silver track.

She told him once, “It isn’t yours,
That light you chase, it cannot feel.”
But boys don’t hear through closing doors,
They only learn through what won’t heal.

His wings wore down like woven lace,
He rose until the dark turned blue.
The flame, it never knew his face—
But still, he swore its warmth was true.

And when he fell, they called it flight.
He burned, and called the burning love.
No echo followed into night—
Just ash that drifted high above.

There’s something about late September
that makes me want to text people
I only miss when I’m too tired to lie.

There’s a moth in my mouth again.
I try to sing and it *****.

Some nights I rehearse conversations
with people I haven’t forgiven.
Some of them are alive.
Some of them are me.

I keep a list of people
I swore I’d stop dreaming about.
I keep dreaming anyway.

I talk to no one
like they’ll answer differently this time.
I wake up with a wingbeat
pressed into the backs of my teeth.

I think I’m leaking
something no one taught me how to name.
It leaves stains on my straws
It fogs the mirror before I do.
It answers to my voice
but only when I’m not using it.

There’s something about late September
that makes everything feel returned,
but not forgiven.
I don’t text them.
I let the silence say maybe I meant to.