One bigger than my nine-year-old hands.
Its scribbles of legs were stuck, frozen
to the cement of the classroom windowsill.

It looked in through the mist of the harsh March air
at me as if it had flickered from the flowered light
of some dream I hadn’t flown through yet.

Nothing in its stare seemed less than planetary.
The dead engine of its wings stalled with frost.
I was a child still, frozen in the moment until

his teacher’s coat flapped over her shoulders
on her way out to free it with her fingernails
and lay it in a bed of dead daylilies.

Won’t fly, she said, shedding her coat again,
but it’s alive. Frost filigreed on windows dissolved
by afternoon, but my thoughts were stuck

in the morning, how she’d balanced the moth
on her hands with such care,
the way one would the last flame on a cold planet.

Marcus Whalbring's most recent poetry collection How to Draw Fire appeared in 2020. His poems have appeared in publications like The Cortland Review, Spry, and others. He's a father, husband, and teacher.