Corpses in Frame
by Livi Thrasher

Runestone, volume 12

for the purple fairy moth & Granddad, 11th Armored
Cavalry Regiment, “Blackhorse”

“Oh, the immediate reaction would be a sense of relief that our men were coming home. But as
we saw the consequences of what we had done, inevitable remorse and divisive recrimination
would scar our spirit as a people.”
 – Richard Nixon, 1967

i.

a pause is a pose.
let me not end here.
hear me not twitch there.
linked on a branch

you pinion other limbs on me,
metallic limbs
stretched out in
cupping a beaming eye:

click

i beat veined wings
and stretch long feelers
out, try to become gone,
but you of white lux

chase, zoom the lens.
your sun is not my day—
why must you bring its gasps?
why interrupt the nightsong?

you take with a
languaged gaze,
take the greek
     adela, and

wipe quiet with a grin,
like no more hiding,
and before the light
finishes splashing

morning blood
on the trees,
you bag the fallen
for leeching graveyard,

dead and appraised.
hear the wake:
taxonomy. collection.
so then deckle edge me.

wedge my picture next to
stolen name: adela purpurea,
rounding out your tongue,
already forgetting,

and i’ll try to breathe,
hope, and huff apathy
into still hands spitting
photos and see

them wear my
chitin wrong.
this same air you
choke into seeing me.

you are more
plucked from
belonging than i am,
and wings cannot home.

ii.

We dart under, through, and on leaf and thorn, brushing past mosquito clumps, slipping
over purpled legs, landing on a pile of muck and piss and maybe a crumpled flower or
two. This war blends skin into gut, rings ears into melody. You won’t find us in day or
dusk, emerging only with a flick from radio light—pulled out, pulled into static demand:
Secure the area. Map out the dark. Sprint through the day. Repair what is dust. Shackled
to the wing beats of the next migration.

When the cameras come we beg to stand alone. Otherwise we too become a blend.
What does his mouth, my shoulder matter to a thin lens? We’re all one guy’s pen stroke.
We’re all flesh and grenade, a brief marriage of sky and green and splatter. This war
gives boys and takes brothers. This exists in shadows the wind could shake with
one breath. This war turns fat flies lazing on gun barrels into enemy. All is a dark eye. All
is a buzzing death. To blink is to hold Hell in a pulse. And still.

iii.

for all that granddad joked about dementia there was
always a fact or memory or piece of someone’s living to cut 

and show. maybe from the paper retrieved from the doormat
or an email .org newsletter signed up for through mail order in 

the 00s or sometimes from a real book if really good. these
were to be produced at dinner, as if to dine with youngsters 

required proving the archetype. granddad: just a tad
weird. not wanting to call up his defining feature, the

hot two years of his youth. a bullet through the elbow
sent him home. some cash and a newborn sent him back.

in his second year, he choked down chicken heads,
bananas, rice, and the thought that each day contained

shouldering his best drill yell telling men how not to die.
he left war again at twenty-three, a father, and stomached

a southern summer. older, he prodded about boyfriends and
printed. often these clippings were of lore i do not care to recall

now, batting averages and the meals mothers prepped for men
to hit balls over the fence. weird jellos. how he used to sport

a hairy line on each cheek before he said it felt like petting soft
sherpa and then: ‘nam. he shaved it short, tongue a stiff limb 

re-sored. i took evidence home via my mother’s purse that flexed
out, bearing too much of living requisite. most were lost, crumpled.

one i found years later stuffed beneath a puckered trash bag.
the purple fairy moth: paper not unlike its namesake, burrowed

in an unthought place. adela purpurea. little known about
their endurance, populous across new england. few pictures,

no sounds. they wear a violet shimmer in a silent kingdom.
the males raise their long antennae. they traverse, and they 

outlast their defining attempt. i fumble now for granddad, for the
printing of the page, did he see himself unthought, find himself 

in minim? now he is stuffed in glass and frame, pupils caught in
the lens. a wink of life. corpsed in his own staging.

an early grief, papers, and i with these questions, my thoughts a
quiet thunder. this unexplainable link. these acts i neither 

cataloged nor filed. i never paused to observe the self censor, the
redirect.