Monarch

There is something growing inside the chrysalis
buried in the pit of my stomach.

It will not emerge for months; part of me wants to keep
it there, silking, hanging from the underleaf.

The truth is I have already migrated. Possessions that once
meant something are in body bags at the bottom of the ocean.

All that matters now is the pudgy mass meshing together
over nine metamorphisms.

There are so many things I want to tell it, of alchemical
love and what it can conjure,

colours I see when I close my eyes – orange, black, white,
how the shape of it is made of these shades.

I will wait in limbo as it sheds off its skins, holding
onto something that does not not belong to me.

Creation is as unstable as it is lonely, and how lonely it will feel
when it stretches its wings and says:

I am a monarch now; watch me fly.