Two Poems by Carlee Bouillon

FIRST IT IS BROWN, WET, A BUD. A COCOON DROPPED

into a wet balloon, fastened there. Then it blooms into fingers and legs. Toes, arms, a name. A sensation. Some would say a miracle. I will know it is there. I am afraid I will not know it is there. In the moment of my life when hallucinogens transcended my body into pure aesthetic witness, I sat warming by a bonfire and watched orange flames turn purple. The sky had so many extra stars. I could decipher each blue star that had landed on the moon since they started falling six thousand years ago. I counted them all night, my back laid flat over the world’s only logging road made entirely of broken tile mosaic. Somehow it seemed the moon never ran out of craters. Perhaps each of them mattered.

GRIZZLY BEARS IN NORTHERN CANADA EAT TEN

thousand army cutworm moths per day in the spring. With large and hairy paws they turn over stones and scrape metamorphals from trees. Fill their bellies with a pile of tissue paper bugs. When I was a kid I ate a worm because I looked up to my brother. We turned over stones to find ladybugs, angered bees’ nests in trees. Made bows from brittle branches. Pushed sap warts until they popped in our faces. Did everything wrong. We never planned to have forever together. But when he became the aurora so much sooner than he was supposed to, I looked for him in grizzlies. On the northern Canadian coast, grizzlies are a dozen dimes. How happy my brother would be to scratch his back on a tree bursting with sap warts, belly full of bugs. I imagine him grinning at me with a mouth full of moths; big deliberate chews with wings stuck to his lips.