​Is This One of the Ways to Trap a Butterfly? by Hedy Habra

Portrait of Jacqueline, by Pablo Picasso (Spain) 1960

​Is This One of the Ways to Trap a Butterfly?                                            
  
None of your muses had awakened the nostalgia of your early blue in the midst of broken lines like your last love, Jacqueline, who stirred such cerulean emotions. With wings folded like a trapped butterfly, she has become a coded geography, a cipher transfixed in angular lines. A wide-open eye stares at the movements of your brush: the other, minute like an olive sinking into an eyelet, winks at your muted thoughts as it floats inside your dry martini whose stem forms the ridge of her nose. Is it because some butterflies hear with their wings that her feathered eyebrows extend into veined wings, filling her head with stories, perhaps told by elves whispering in her ear?
 
Hedy Habra
 
This poem was first published by Panoply.
 
​Hedy Habra is a poet, artist, and essayist. Her latest poetry collection, Or Did You Ever See The Other Side?, won International Poetry Book Awards and was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer and USA Best Book Awards. The Taste of the Earth won the Silver Nautilus Book Award and Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Tea in Heliopolis won the Best Book Award, and Under Brushstrokes was a finalist for the International Book Award. Her story collection, Flying Carpets, won the Arab American Book Award’s Honorable Mention and was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. Her book of criticism is Mundos alternos y artísticos en Vargas Llosa. She is a twenty-five-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and a recipient of the Nazim Hikmet Award. https://www.hedyhabra.com/