Alex Long
Turned Thing
VIRUS wings the wind outside, hunting air.
I hide inside, turning my house into a cocoon,
turning me from prey into a chrysalis.
Sometime in the future I will emerge,
a turned thing in a turned world. Blind to that
future I spin in my paste, weaving strands
of action plans, an eyeless pupa pulping in a
tiny pallid purse. Maybe the world will be
shrunk afterwards. Technology and trade might
get hacked back so that this sickness will have
less globe to grow on.
But what do I know?
I’m just a
butterfly.
Alex Long is a Midwestern poet whose work has appeared in Meetinghouse and The Wax Paper, as well as in the anthology Iowa’s Best Emerging Poets 2019 (Z Publishing, 2019), edited by Z Publishing staff. You can find him on Twitter @BiddyBiddyBum.
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