“How a Luna Moth Grows Up” is the first-place winner in our Rabbit Room Poetry Prism Contest! We’re so grateful to everyone who submitted and shared their work with us. We’ll be posting the winning poems here over the next few weeks.
By Adam Whipple
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They, that is to say, the hospice nurses, say you stop eating in the end, which I guess makes sense, although that’s a zoologist’s measure by which luna moths are judged to be adults. With no mouths to speak of, late they rise somewhere between a blue and a green, banners blazing like seraphim full of eyes intent on finding each other, nothing more, among the mint, amid the damp osiers. Everyone I know has wondered when they’ll cease to feel like children, but perhaps the nurses will tell someday when they have seen far too often the great, bedridden fast their patients entered upon. They will tell how we lifted, at once perplexed, from our cots to realize what we had always known, blue as mint in a certain light, purposed at last only upon a mighty togetherness.
Adam Whipple is a musician, poet, and author living in Knoxville, Tennessee, and a graduate of Carson-Newman University. His essays and poetry have appeared in Curator Magazine, Blue Mountain Review, The Pigeon Parade Quarterly, and Analogue. His albums can be found on all major digital outlets.
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Photo by Thomas Elliott on Unsplash
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