Recurring Dream With Bright Orange Everything

// Molly McGinnis

I am standing in a church basement full
of monarch butterflies.

It smells like a perfume my grandfather
would have called dark humor

wrung from wet bark
at 6 pm in an impossible grove

of hundred-year-old trees and
folding chairs.

Nobody warned me it would be like this.
A window propped open

with serious books hints escape route
and I climb through it

watching for butterflies. They are all
over my hands, my hair.

In a puddle, I realize my eyelashes
have turned bright orange.