Insomnia Again

Wing dust from a cecropia moth stains my hands and cheek.  I hoped to save it from the car grill 
where it was snared in a 2 a.m. drive.  Still pulsing with half shredded forewings and leaking 
thorax.  I might have stayed home and walked silent rooms or played solitaire on the clawfoot 
table, though the king of hearts is missing from the deck.  The strawberries are already turned to 
jam but the bread is moldy and of no use if I want to eat.  The still-warm blacktop shusses 
beneath my tires and first-cut hay smells like seventeen again.  I tuck the moth into a rose bush 
and lick the thorn blood.  I am rueful, the moon is rueful; the sky lightens in the east.








Lisa J. Cihlar's poems appeared or are forthcoming in The South Dakota Review, Green Mountains Review, Crab Creek Review, Blackbird, and The Prose-Poem Project. One of her poems was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  Her chapbook, “The Insomniac’s House,” is available from Dancing Girl Press and a second chapbook, “This is How She Fails,” is available from Crisis Chronicles Press.  She lives in rural southern Wisconsin.