Failed Attempts at Flight

While walking back home from the train station late Monday night, I saw this little bugger attempting to take off from the grimy spit and gum-stained cement ground just a few feet from the bottom of the filthy escalator. The butterfly-moth was beautiful, white winged and black speckled, with a body that looked like a meaty cigarette or else some other kind of joint. I filmed as it flailed around, failing to do what it was born to. 

I kept photographing it and filming it and I captured a slow-motion video as well.

Like a heartbeat under enormous anxiety, the butterfly-moth pulsated its wings faster and faster, sadly to no avail. Finally giving up, or perhaps tired of its consciousness from being watched by me, the enormous human, it walked away, gorgeous wings heavy and useless, like a costume just for show. 

What happens when we're born with things that don't do what they are supposed to? What becomes of those defunct appendages of evolution rendered useless? 

Mostly I wonder if my bug friend wandered to its death. I hope it is able to feed and grow and live in its flightless wings, take shelter underneath and find another way. 

The fragile thing.

- F

In Which I Decide To Grow Wings"

because I can no longer feel my feet.
Was it a trick of genetics or a magic potion

that made my fingers into feathers or fins
ready for a different kind of escapade?

My body is slowly giving itself away
from this universe. It sparkles, sometimes sparks,

in this alien air. And I can have the hair I always wanted,
long and blue, the kind that thrashes behind me

with its own anima. Maybe shiny scales.
If I’ve become unrecognizable, I’m okay with that.

I’m happy to leave behind my misadventures, 
live inside someone else’s warm-lined skin.

I’ll arrive with a suitcase of snakes and silks, 
a map to a new evolution, a sky full of discovery.

by Jeanine Hall Gailey 
Sourced from: Faerie Magazine

(I found this gorgeous photo somewhere within the internet. I have no idea where it's from.)

- F