Blue Morpho

Evana Bodiker in the Music Library Glass Room in Wilson Library.

Evana Bodiker in her favorite writing spot, the Music Library Glass Room in Wilson Library. She said in an article in the creative writing program’s newsletter, “For a young poet, this is so reassuring in terms of my future as a writer. … It’s still hard to believe a book of my poetry will be out in the world for people to read.” (photo by Kristen Chavez)

“Blue Morpho”

The greenhouse humidity

moved down our backs

like the sweat beads

on our Pimm’s cups

hours before in the garden

bar. She was our tiny

liaison, so that he and I

might say the right words

that evening more easily,

a tender empress fluttering

overhead until she chose

to land on his university

sweater first. Her frayedCover of Evana Bodiker's chapbook Ephemera.

wings burned cobalt

in the late London

afternoon. She let me

touch her next, climbing

onto my fingers

like they were sugar,

her gentle trapeze

teasing my skin.

He misread her name

on the placard, morphe,

but later he christened

her accurately: morpho.

For the rest of the day,

I dreamed of her

on my slouched shoulder,

my body an accomplice

in her disappearing act.

 

By Evana Bodiker ’18

Evana Bodiker is a senior pursuing majors in English and religious studies and a minor in creative writing. “Blue Morpho” is one of the poems featured in her new poetry collection, Ephemera (Texas Review Press, spring 2018). She won the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize for Ephemera, which is composed largely of poems written in her intermediate and advanced poetry courses at UNC. In a blog interview with the press, she said, “In another life, I would have been a naturalist or an entomologist. I love how intricate insects’ lives are … [they] represent ephemerality to me. … Ephemera are things only enjoyed for a short period of time.”

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