Caught in the gusting wind,
a swallowtail flutters ahead.
The lights are red
for eight lanes in each direction,
leaving a vast emptiness
at the heart of the intersection,
except for a few left-turning SUVs,
and the butterfly,
buffeted by monsoon winds
from feeding on golden bells
in the median
to this oddly desolate space,
wings beating ineffectually.
Soon, the light will change
and I will drive forward
with the rest, complicit
in an ephemeral death.
Carol Poster is the author of three chapbooks of poetry, most recently Returning to Dust (Finishing Line Press 2017), and verse translations from Latin, Classical Greek, and French. She has also published three books of commercial nonfiction and currently lives in Tucson, Arizona where she works as a freelance writer and photographer. Her books can be found at: https://www.amazon.com/Carol-Poster/e/B001JRUYTA
Image by B137 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
