Mirage by Laura Stringfellow

Freud would have called it wish.

Or fulfillment. Damp. A moving

forest the color of emerald. My god

mother slicing the lake with the thin

nose of a canoe as smoothly as she

cuts through the lining of chocolate cake.

Her name is Virginia — which, in dream,

as in life, appears geographically

and symbolically significant. An eye

of sapphire floats at the edge of the lake,

tapping as a finger might on glass.

My mother, next to me, seems to emit

something like the tears of angels or devas.

When ghosts whisper, I hear my mother say

in her southern drawl, they speak mist.

I think of them traveling over rivers.

But, she insists, they can't cross water.

A luna moth flies from her mouth

and dissolves into a moon's disc

in Dali-like metamorphosis.

For some reason, it makes me think

of the Morpho butterfly, the iridescent scales

of its wings unfolding into a fan of azure.

Laura Stringfellow writes both verse and prose poetry, holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, and hails from the muggy strangelands of the Southern U.S. Recent publications have appeared in various journals including Déraciné, Eunoia Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, and Thirteen Myna Birds.