Rescue

By the gas station rust dumpsters,
against wavelengths of fence links,
she tucks in legs, sucks her menthol,
a kid unknown to the hour-rush home.

She senses the halo around gas pumps,
under canopy’s down-shining underside.
It lures a luna moth, green as lime leaves,
baited like she is to these fluorescent oases.

As it’s confused by bright lights,
it cannot escape to mate darkness,
to braid starshine into jade feathers,
like she distrusts her eyesight tonight.

Fatigue of wings. She hears it fall onto
asphalt aggregate steaming with summer.
Eye spots are blind, her glasses are broken,
still she’ll dart through the lot to save a blur.

Two lifetimes ago, Catherine Zickgraf performed her poetry in Madrid. Now her main jobs are to write and hang out with her family. Her work has appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Pank, Victorian Violet Press, and The Grief Diaries. Her chapbook, Soul Full of Eye, is published through Aldrich Press.

[image: Luna Lights Up The Night | Sue Capuano]