Peach Pits

A girl is found by the highway
two towns over from ours. If her hair
was knotted with

brown blood and thorns, the
police report didn't say. I killed a
butterfly and rubbed the color from its wings, the saddest shade

of magenta I've ever touched,
and I'm thinking of the tiniest grass cuts
on my shins and mud beneath my nails

and the top of the world after dark--
the highest hill in town where we swear, with
held breaths, that a bus driver drove

a school bus full of weeping, screaming, or, maybe, laughing children
off the cliff. Say, with held breaths, listen
for their laughter on the leaves

of trees we will never learn the names of.
The leaves are changing and I name
this season Orange.

Later, I watch fireworks alone from the third floor.
In the window, I look at my reflection and
then past me, or through me,

across the river, where the fireworks
explode and fall and seem
so small,

like the smallest crumbs of toast with jam or
the pits of peaches or the way the sound
of tap-dancing would look in the sky

or UFOs. They fit in the hollow of my eye,
when I stand just so.
So I stand just so.

Remember what they say about hindsight.
The girl they found regrets not
wearing clean underwear that day

and peeking when they kissed
for the first time in the linen closet.
Only because he opened his eyes, too.

Her mother doesn't stop crying
for three weeks--
until she starts to laugh.

You have to understand,
I killed the butterfly because I thought
it was a moth.

Or, I didn't know it would die
so soon.
I carried it into the house

and by the kitchen, it was dead.
I wanted to lick the dust from its wings, but
you came inside

and I forgot.
I have also forgotten about the girl when I'm driving down highway five
and see a cross on the side of the road;

got out of the car and shut my eyes
and laid down in the dirt.
The cross of flowers looked blurred, like

fireworks, when I peeked through matted
eyelashes. The worst case of child
abuse known: the girl

bit through her own lip
to stand the pain. I bite down on my lip 'til blood.
I wake to a police officer

dusting dirt from my hair.
Homebound, I remember the way the butterfly
struggled against my hand,

wings like a heartbeat in my closed palm, like a
seizure, a rain dance, a swerving car and its
passengers praying.