Heliconian

Poetry
Written By AE Hines

This morning, a spotted orange butterfly
touches down on my shoulder, and I forget

for a moment one side of the earth
shimmies and burns, and on the other,

fresh floods sally away great swaths
of land. I forget the sun in places shines

its merciless face on dry soils crying out
for rain. I want to name it, this moment

of forgetting. Of believing there’s any
coming back for us. When this tiny

brush-footed muse lifts off, she grazes
the short peak of my nose, waves

her brief shadow across my eyes, leaving
me here, astonished by all this light.

AE Hines

AE Hines is the author of Adam in the Garden (Charlotte Lit Press, 2024) and Any Dumb Animal (Main Street Rag, 2021). He has won the Red Wheelbarrow Prize and Palette Poetry’s Love and Eros Prize, and has been a finalist for the Montreal International Poetry Prize. His poems have been widely published in such journals as The Southern Review, Rattle, The Sun, Prairie Schooner and Alaska Quarterly. And his literary criticism can be found in American Poetry Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Rain Taxi, and Northwest Review. He received his MFA from Pacific University, and resides in Charlotte and Medellín, Colombia. www.aehines.net

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