Early in adolescence, your larval nymphalid body
shimmered, heavy with breasts and wide-eyed, soft-skinned,
and you, waiting inside your chrysalis, longed for
it to split along iridescent lines, revealing yourself.
They say that the body is transformed, metamorphic,
dissolved completely into gossamer and light
within its shell, bloody and cracked and visceral,
until something reconstructs exoskeleton into legs,
eyes, breath, joints, circulation, wings.
The bones were almost broken, hips and ribs
bruised in your attempts to obliterate and remake.
Later, your gaze cobalt, your chest planar, your
shoulders set back in hurricane wings,
crescents of iron glitter beneath your
fingernails where you tore your body apart
and let the juvenile mess of blood and
twitching limbs congeal into adult forms.
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