Ectoplasm
Juliet Mattila
A cloudless word, fluorescence. My memories of summer
back in the years when television was new, when
counterinsurgency sprays had not yet been
directed against insects or the rest of us;
evenings, then, were our late arenas, where we ran
far across the neighborhood lawns florid in after-
glow, unsupervised until a parent called. I spent
hours and hours swerving through twilight pursuing
illumination, commandeering old Mason
jars to catch lightning bugs for our next-door neighbor,
a kind man investigating sources of cold
light for the Navy. As night occupied the sky,
millions of fireflies sparked and rose up from the grass,
now blazing, now dark, moving invisibly and
obliquely out of sight. Salary: one penny
per beetle. It took thousands to research the trick
of how they bring lust to light without heat.
Running back and forth in the spacious dusk, I would
slide a pale hand behind slow wings and then seize it!
—They tingled like my feet when I peered into the
unreal fluoroscope at the shoe store, saw dark bones
verified inside green toes, green shoes. Then someone
wrote up the dangers of picturing young feet with
X-rays, and the machines vanished, as would, after
years of spraying our endless waves of grain, all those
zigzagging fireflies, and night returned to the stars.