Perhaps the most depressing poem I have ever read.

Evolution Margaret Ross The corpses weigh nothing, nearly nothing, even your breath is breeze enough to scatter them We steamed them in tupperware with a damp sponge then we tweezed the stiff wings open The wing colors would brush off if you touched them 3,000 butterflies raised and gassed and shipped to Evolution, the store in New York rented by an artist hired to design a restaurant He wanted to paper the walls with butterflies Each came folded in its own translucent envelope We tweezed them open, pinned them into rows on styrofoam flats we stacked in towers in the narrow hallway leading to the bathroom Evolution called itself a natural history store It sold preserved birds, lizards, scorpions in lucite, bobcat with the eyes dug out and glass ones fitted, head turned Also more affordable bits like teeth and peacock feathers, by the register a dish of raccoon penis bones This was on Spring The sidewalks swarmed with bare-armed people there to see the city You could buy your own name in calligraphy or written on a grain of rice by someone at a folding table Souvenir portraits of taxis and the Brooklyn Bridge lined up on blankets laid over the pavement The artist we were pinning for had gotten famous being first to put a dead shark in a gallery For several million dollars each he sold what he described  as happy pictures which were rainbow dots assistants painted  on white canvases I remember actually thinking his art confronted death, that’s how young I was We were paid per butterfly The way we sat, I saw the backs of the other pinners’ heads more than their faces One’s braids the color of wine, one’s puffy headphones, feather cut and slim neck rising from a scissored collar, that one bought a raccoon penis bone on lunch break Mostly we didn’t speak Another life glimpsed in a detail mentioned, leaving or arriving  She lived with a carpenter who fixed her lunches Come fall I’d be in college I smelled the corpses on my fingers when I took my smoke break leaning against a warm brick wall facing the smooth white headless mannequins in thousand-dollar shift dresses The deli next door advertised organic toast and raisins on the vine Mornings, I tried to learn from eyeliner and shimmer on faces near mine on the train Warm fogged imprint on a metal pole where someone’s grip evaporated Everyone looking down when someone walked through  asking for help At Evolution, talk radio played all day A cool voice giving hourly updates on the bombing of another city which it called the conflict The pinner in headphones sometimes hummed or started a breathy lyric “Selfish girl—” I watched my tweezers guide the poisonous exquisite blue of morpho wings Their legs like jointed eyelashes False eyes on the grayling wingtips to protect the true face The monarch’s wings like fire pouring through a lattice Copyright © 2020 by Margaret Ross. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 22, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.