01
They are not symbols.
02
They are butterflies
with peanut butter
stuck between their wings
outside the nut farm
a bit north of San Francisco,
where the fog keeps arriving
like a soft correction
and the trees keep standing
in their patient rows
as if patience were enough.
03
Someone dropped a sandwich once.
Or a child did.
Or a worker ate too fast,
laughed,
wiped their hands on nothing.
04
Now the sweetness is elsewhere.
05
It has found the hinge.
06
It has chosen the exact place
a body needs to stay light.
07
The wings try to open
and fail—
not dramatically,
not with a clean snap,
just with that small, doomed effort
of tissue meeting tack.
08
They shiver.
They keep testing
the same half-inch of air
like it might suddenly become different.
09
But it won’t.
10
Peanut butter does not forgive.
11
It sits there,
warm in the afternoon,
getting darker,
collecting grit,
collecting pollen
like evidence
that the world happened
while they were stuck.
12
Their bodies are so thin
it feels rude to look.
13
Two commas of life
beneath stained glass,
breathing so fast
it sounds like nothing
unless you kneel.
14
I want to say:
this is what love does,
this is what attachment does,
this is what hunger does,
this is what the sticky parts do.
15
But that would be a lie.
16
This is just peanut butter.
17
And a rule of physics
wearing a soft brown mask.
18
The nut farm hums behind the fence,
machines that know what they’re for,
shells turning into money,
order turning into product,
the steady alchemy
of grinding and grinding
until everything is smooth.
19
Out here,
the butterflies are not becoming anything.
20
They are spending
their last clean sugar.
21
They are living
on what is left
after flight.
22
One tries again.
The wings lift a fraction,
then settle back
as if the body has learned
a new definition of open.
23
The sun shifts.
The fog leans in.
A truck passes.
The orchard keeps behaving.
24
The butterflies keep being
small, bright, ruined facts.
25
Soon a bird will notice.
Or an ant.
Or the cold will arrive
with its simple hands.
26
Soon the wings will stiffen
in the wrong position—
closed not as rest,
but as sentence.
27
If you need a rule,
take this:
some sweetness
isn’t for wings.
28
Some spreads
are only for mouths.
29
And some losses
don’t become poems.
They just happen
on the ground,
north of the city,
in the thin hours
when nothing intervenes.