You Own the Ground You Land On
Tacey Atsitty
Originally published in Resilience, Issue #45 – Searching for Home Ground
I drag my pencil lead across each page
when suddenly I hear a fluttering
of wings, the kind unlike a buzzing fly,
the dissonance familiar to my ear—
And then I know the winged ones are back,
those ladies and their scuttlebutts returned!
They’ll make their way along the wainscotting,
a highway going nowhere fast. They say
that ladybugs cannot feel love or grief,
they can express their anger
They say that ladybugs are best of luck,
they bring a loving presence to your home,
a baby even, new life never known—
I tell my husband, It’s that time of year.
They’ve come to finish off their life cycle,
instead of bringing luck, they offer gifts
of contrition, as though it were their fault,
as though they’d already known: she was here,
her dime-sized body curved, now flown away.
It means a lot to us—when rounding back
to fill the sunroom ceiling like a cloud
of locusts, hundreds scurry, living life
till gliding to their graves: a desk, a night-
stand, a hand-shaped bowl or end table.
In the end, a beetle is a beetle,
I tell myself at times— I’m sorry still
we haven’t swept your wings. I’m sorry—all
red has drained and left your chitin orange, with
broken wings lain near your body-tombs, like
petals plucked and strewn about: your gusty
final breaths begin to settle into
a calming wave of gravestones, thick with gray.