Butterfly III

Decades later I think about my friend
who once said “butterflies are creepy”
with a wince and a sneer as if asked
to attack some universally precious thing
a baby cat or something preposterous like
limiting water usage to economic contribution,
or saying my favourite Pokemon is Magikarp,
like why, who are you,
as if my idea of good and bad was twisted.
I remember wanting to know more
but the bell rang and we left it at that,
better not reveal my adjacency to basic,
a square with frills, premature normcore.

I had a thought the other day bringing me back
to this encounter, a hypothesis for her distaste.
It might be the way their wings have the pattern
of eyes, the intense stare of someone
who was never really looking,
an illusion to grant you importance.
What degree of unsettled a preteen must be,
lips touched neither blood nor wine
a chapped pout with no devotion to gloss

just one boy you’d rather forget, and besides that,
strawberry smacker and grandma’s drugstore red
because mom had four kids and not one reason for lipstick.
She’d already grasped all the tricks and fleeting,
more or less nothing, some ashes over rot.
How smart she was to know
beauty was a trap and I fell right into it
all lovely and 19 and still pink
tingled to the edge of my colour
by boys with eyes and plans and hungers
turning red into Wall Street black.

By then it was already too late to run,
so I close my eyes
and fly,
wake up eight years later divorced with
two orange cats and a dozen reds—
Ruby Woo and Chili in the pack,

And the friend:
married with two kids a townhome and all that,
pink lipstick and perfect veneers, basically
a real life Benjamin Button magic trick
pulling butterflies out of the hat.

That’s one way to look at it.
The other,
a warning.