Junebugs

JUNEBUGS

By Suzanne Moberly

A bladder, compromised by five births,
Awakes her in the night.
She flips on the bathroom light
and revels in the sweet release
when she spies them
Marooned on blue-white tiles.

Five – two larger in the center surrounded by
Three smaller versions of themselves,
immobile, observing their elders,
inverted flailing, hard, top heavy oval husks
Trapping them on the floor.

Was this how they looked to their three?
Stuck, flailing, unable to help one another,
Paralyzed with the precarious
unbalanced weight of life.

She gently scoops up the three spectators
And releases them
Back through the screen
from the same torn hole of their entry.

The hole,
Always a source of contention,
Another daily disarray
she has learned to live with
or fix herself.

She is tired of fixing.
She is tired of the mess,
The mess of life always pressing,
needing to be fixed.

She reaches down to the cool tile
and one by one carefully
contains the larger bugs
In her hands.
The motion flips them upright, and
she smiles to feel their wings
flutter within her
sheltering palms.

The smaller three are back
clinging to the screen.
The insistent buzz of their wings
a statement of waiting and refusal to
abandon their separated family.

She carefully releases the pair
back out into the night.
Immediately
she hears the whirring buzz of the entire quintet
fly off into the soft summer night
and the remainder of their
brief
and danger fraught lives.

Tomorrow –
She resolves to fix the screen.