Letter From A Butterfly Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

A hand falls on me
stretched out,
soft, soft
on my wood-thick skin,

its finger nails
the ashy spray
of a creeping buckeye

rubbing its wings
on my rolling arm

swung through wind
like a flying moth
from a mouth-ballooned
bubble gum
creeping with a stroking breeze,

as I toss off wings,
taking an arachnid
for a nib-beaked bird
trotting on me, a log of wood,

as it writes out
a song of love
drilled deep as a hole
into my shoulder
with a pecked script.

(ii)

Is flowery Nayah,
the tree bower girl
in a ponytail

writing out a message
with a thorn-pointed
woodpecker's beak?

Do her fingers fly
through a sheet,
with digging flames
from her core

drifting and gliding
and burning
through her nails
with a smolder
from her eyes hearth?

(iii)

She punches out
wood dust
on paper swelling
with wood skin.

And sprays a page
with a volcano's smoke
spread out
in blotches
of sand-grained ink.

Creeping to splay
the desert left
of our love
split into dark sand grains,

when I hear and grab
only dots and dashes
of a morse code
from a storm's whistle
in puffs of wind.

O I miss a lover's whisper
blowing ash
from a bouncing fire
deep in a peek's volcano.

But her message
is written in squiggles -
with foot prints
of a croaking fleeing toad
from a dry pot of ink.