Open the curtain on a chrysalis: tawdry,
tiny home. It is not wet. It says,
here is my body-to-be; soft shelter,
near season. It says, wait. You are
becoming, perhaps, or soon. Or you are
never. Never. Yes. And no man, and unflinch;
ten toes and tinny, gangrenous voices;
limp fist and limber, inarticulate.

The chrysalis holds a gavel. It’s on a bench.
The bench is made of metal; all eyes in the open
are angry. All anger in the eyes is open.
All openness of the eyes is anger; such a fine
anger, machete blunt and swung, as if you, too,
smashed the stump, as if the chrysalis
still breathed, still beat; who is swinging
not a bench but a white wrought-iron chair,
it is you, it is you in fugue,
it is flaw and feist and thirst, and you
plant the chrysalis in your blood and suddenly
it is nurture? It is soft and wet, slime, symbiosis?

No, little home, little new room, you say.
It is torture. How sweet; it is torture.

Kate Marchetto (she/her) lives, writes, loves, and occasionally lies in Durham, North Carolina. She earned her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. Her poems have appeared in Minerva Rising, Great Weather for MEDIA, ninepatch: a Creative Journal of Women & Gender Studies, and New Fraktur Arts Journal; she is almost certainly tired and, while she may not be hungry, she could eat.