I was miraculously reincarnated
after my death in the background
of a male artist’s bio.
He called me Muse,
trussed me up like a pig, told me never
to tell my mom. Then, full up and dripping
with his genius, he told me
we were going to the Lake District
to celebrate our anniversary.
He killed me there by the side
of the lake.
I became tragic beautiful
lunches for crows.
As I died I said to them –
beaks deep in the bowls of my hips,
I said to them –
tell me
if I will come back
as a painter.
They slurped up my veins like earthworms.
If you died, Eva,
I would really, really miss you.
The caterpillar plays dead
because he does not want me to kill him
with my cruel paper towel.
The caterpillar
does not want
to be smushed into scripture
on
the glass. Worse yet the caterpillar does not want me to write
another poem
about how good a person I am for saving bugs
instead of killing them.
The caterpillar hates my poems. He grows
to six thousand times his size, approximately, and now he looks like
my father, except he is a
caterpillar. And he goes
to the fridge
and gets a Diet Pepsi with one of his hundred
wiggly
legs and as he twists the cap off he tells me
he’ll never
love me the way I need and for God’s sake
to stop writing poems
about him because enough poets cry
about their parents. He thinks I should probably go to med school
to
become a good caterpillar like he is and to not
even THINK about
using the growing-
into-butterfly-metaphor.
Eva Haas is a queer artist and poet originally from Ktaqmkuk (St. John's, Newfoundland). She has recently completed a BA in Writing at the University of Victoria and her term as Victoria's eleventh Youth Poet Laureate. Her work has been a finalist for competitions at CBC, Room and Frontier, and can be found in The Malahat Review and Riddle Fence.