The dark isn’t dark, it is sound. The bark of the white birch, peeling. The bugs in the bore of their business. The unkempt grasses fitting the breeze between their blades. Now a feather falls, its silence catastrophic, and I am broken back to childhood, where the fireflies took their yellow breaths above the field surrounded by trees, and I raised my arms, I birled.
***
Luciferase is necessary. Oxygen, calcium, adenosine triphosphate, luciferin, too, as if Satan itself had wrangled for acclaim in the chemistry of fireflies.
***
The trees were the hills were alive. The earth was no one else’s. My head broken back, my bangs bushwhacked, my nose a slice through sky, I shattered the night with my holler. Teeth and tongue beneath the yellow crackled breathing of the bugs.
***
Not that the firefly has lungs. The word for the mechanism by which the firefly breathes is tracheoles. The word is probably not breathe. The girl is probably not me
***
anymore. Or: Where are all the fireflies?
***
Cicadas in their sleeves. Birds in their steep. A whisker rubbing against clover. A rabbit in its last appeal to the fox. A girl one holler short, one sleep away from forgetting.
