Decoupage
At night your ghost comes barreling down I-95
a butterfly net in its sturdy freckled fist
sweeping the rushing wind for
Polaroid ash
rising up from the pavement, the ditches
blowing in from the swamps
falling from the damp Florida sky
In twilight it sits
beneath the streetlamp of a roadside rest
painstakingly assembling the cinders
of our once glossy faces, its ears
fill with the buzz of vending machines, its eyes
squint into a macabre harvest, its fingers
discard crushed mosquitos with
unfeeling surgical precision
picking through fading flutters
of moths, whose untimely ends
cannot be undone.
Parachutes
terminal velocity reached
long before my mother’s birth
spawned abandon
in classic freefall
ripcords braked, jerked
suspension lines outstretched
a patchwork medusa
of stained bulbous satin
victim of gravity
horizontal currents, left to
gorge itself on cold
cream’s rose perfume
since settled, draping itself thinly
atop these veins
tunneling prettily through ancient bones.
Renee Agatep writes of her Rust Belt beginnings but now lives in Florida. She earned her master’s at Northeastern University and studies creative writing at the University of Central Florida. Her work appears in The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Rust+Moth, The Lascaux Review and elsewhere. More: reneeagatepwrites.wordpress.com + Twitter @GoingbyRenee