from Tracing the Movements of Butterflies                             The emergent butterfly has no idea that at one time six legs were inadequate to support its long frame.     Movement 1   There is a famous old saying that to make hare stew it is first necessary to catch your hare.   Teivah waits for the bus at the corner outside her apartment. She makes lists in her head while she watches people walk by, decides to call her son when she gets home that afternoon.   The bus arrives and she is swallowed   like a slippery fish into the ocean of late morning, whole, pure.     When he goes to his swimming lesson, it takes Jacob a few extra minutes to practise his jump from the highest   diving board. The teacher is watching him. He closes his eyes, pressing his thighs together before he throws   his body into the water.      Movement 2   A slow-flying coastal species, readily captured.   Sometimes, after dinner, Jacob plays his father’s Klezmer records to the tune of dead butterflies jumping off the page. After his mother has put them to sleep and he lies    listening to his sister snoring and watches the moonlight come in through his window, He sees Teivah, the old Russian woman who lives on the other side of his building.   He watches her shift back and forth on her fat wobbly legs when her light is on and his is off and imagines that she is dancing to Jewish Soul Music.   In this stop-motion light, Her body and Jacob’s butterflies overlap like slides.       Movement 3    The hindwing has a well-developed fold to enwrap and protect its body.   Teivah eats breakfast at her kitchen table with a picture that slowly moves across her mind of her son and his young, bearded American friends laughing over dinner. She imagines their apartment: small, dark and cold, its walls barely holding up the ceiling.   Teivah takes out her book to write: Suitcase, knapsack, handbag, box: what you put things in Luggage: what you take with you   Clock says quarter after ten. The day stretches out like dough before her.     Hebrew Sesame Street is playing in the kitchen; Jacob’s mother runs past him late for work. She doesn’t say goodbye just remember to lock the door this time. This is like a rope   and each word pulls Jacob further away.         Movement 4 The butterflies move slowly, leisurely, as though to taunt their predatory foes. Jacob watches the swallow move from branch to branch on their back balcony. His mother sits at the white plastic picnic table, sipping a lemonade and smoking a cigarette.   They have eyes in the back of their heads you know.   - Ariella Cepelinski