Call it an unsettling, an unwinding from a tightly coiled shape.
A springing-open seed pod of the
touch-me-not, jewelweed, goldfish-flower.
Rename the flowers, it’s been done before.
Coils of slick green, tiny grains of brown seeds
on a trajectory toward the sky and freedom and back to earth.
Call it a no-longer-enduring what has been forced,
coerced by the known and unknown
inside us, around us, woven through us.
In collusion with our mother’s grief and our father’s rage.
In cahoots with our mother’s private madness
and our father’s unsurrendered tears.
Call it a reckoning, a shapeshifting, a transformation.
Return to the shining articulated mahogany pupal case.
Burrow back under the ground and wait.
Call it a rite of passage in a world without rites.
In a world where the incinerator at the funeral home
only gets lit when no families
are scheduled to visit their dead.
When our bodies ache and shake and burn and dissolve,
put down what we are carrying as gently as we can.
Sit down, fall asleep, tremble, wail.
We are all that we have
and sometimes it’s ghosts.
Call it the chewy translucent web left behind by the snake.
Each scale, each eye, inside-out gaping mouth.
She’s already through the grass and down the hole
feeling the earth against her new skin.