a reflex : each time I learn something
beautiful I find a way to make it 
morbid like how the pigment 
of robin egg blue is also what blooms 

in the center of a nasty bruise
how the showiest shades of sunset
blush that way because of pollution
how monarchs sip nectar & also blood.

I found their bodies & some shed shells 
as a child usually too cracked to covet   
kind of gross. tsk don’t touch that snaps 
my mom in my memory but to leave

a luminous fragment behind is to 
unscrew my right foot & abandon
her roadside where dust & quartz
are flirting, quietly. I don’t mind 

dirtying my hand if it means it will
return housing a gull’s feather, dry
snakeskin, or a milkweed pod. to be
clear, I don’t have any money. just

shelves of teeth & seeds & odd bits 
of things that were probably meant 
to outlive us. in school we cut open
owl pellets & fished around for bones.

that day I learned which girls were 
like me not grimacing at gizzard residue 
but instead ecstatic saying  look look what I found