Please join us Thursday, November 1, 2018, at 7:00 pm, when poets Megan Peak and Jennifer Wallace will continue the twelfth season of the Collected Poets Series! Mocha Maya’s Coffee House, 47 Bridge St, Shelburne Falls, MA. ($2-5 suggested donation)

Megan Peak

Megan Peak received her MFA in Poetry from Ohio State University, where she was Poetry Editor at
The Journal. Her poems have appeared in Blackbird, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Pleiades, Ploughshares, and
Verse Daily, among others. She lives in Fort Worth, Texas.

Jennifer Wallace

Jennifer Wallace teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland. She is a poetry editor at The Cortland Review. Her poems, essays and photographs have appeared in artists books, exhibition catalogs, galleries, museums, anthologies and literary journals. Her fourth book, The Want Fire, was published by Passager Books in 2015, and Almost Entirely was published by Paraclete Press in 2017.

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THE KILLING JAR / Megan Peak

I look for dead ones first—
flattened blister beetles black
along the road, blue dasher
floating in the pool, one wing

missing. Dead is easy. Dead
means no ethered exoskeleton,
no dark moon abdomen curled, no
cricket bucking against glass.

Rarely do I find anything intact
or identifiable—sheer wing, burst
thorax. I must swing a sweep net,
carry a killing jar, wade through

tall grass and thicket. I’m told
to name something lifeless,
to practice careful collecting.
Nearby, a butterfly hinges

on chrysanthemum. I think
of it as a she. My net’s full of her
wings—her pale-yellow symmetry.
Pin poised, I press through chitin,

midgut, head. She requires
tenderness, body brittling to dust
as I harpoon her under
the dark cursive of her epithet.

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