My hands are composed of butterflies

My hands are composed of butterflies
making it impossible to grasp the most important of things;

the most important of things slips
into the bright flittering spaces of breath left after flight

ever lost as light
beneath ephemeral wings.


My spine is the birch tree branching higher,
twigs ever-thinner nerve tendrils creeping through the current of flesh;

the current of flesh encodes our lives passed
into the rings of my body to die with dimming sight

insubstantial as light
entwined to the earth.


I hide this extinction

behind my fluttering fingers.
If I could have held onto them

what worlds we could have lived in.

***

Susan Zegarsky is an award winning writer and visual artist who writes fiction and poetry in French, English and Arabic. She is an aficionado of horror, cabinets of curiosity, languages living and dead, and the occult and arcane. Her poetry has been featured in Prismatica, Coffin Bell, The Slake, Cauldron Anthology, Ink in Thirds, Lynx, The Horror Magazine, Autumn Sky, with new work forthcoming. She is the author of Exsanguinarium. A small sample of her work can be found on her website, https://www.zegarsky.com/ and she is @ouisuzette on social media.