Mothballs

Poetry written by CHS Publishing Club teacher and 11th grade ELA teacher, Ms. Reid (featured in an upcoming poetry book)

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Like lepidoptera,

we make up the backbones of hills

and mountains and the foundations of plains 

and valleys of time—

the collective skippers of the Appalachian minds

of women. 

We ask a morbid request:

to pull them up and put in proper drops of cyanoacrylate glue.

They’re like a toxic fungus

to trigger an immune response among us. 

It is a symbol of the innate

ability to communicate

with the mental realm.

I push my broken nails deeper into the floorboards 

and eat holes in my clothes.

We ingest it, so that we eventually starve.

We start laughing in a way 

we cannot control when we perform.

It remains trenchant, heartbreaking—

an uncanny valley metaphor

of our celestial 

bodies expressing their anger, our anger, your anger

of an ancestral 

and inherited response. 

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