PAIGE WINEGAR FETZER
The Past is a Story
PAIGE WINEFAR FETZER
The Past is a Story
We both remember moths—silver pinions haloed
in periphery. You tell our friends there were hundreds—
I close my eyes and see only one, a single seam
unzipping the electric light.
For sixteen years,
this is our party trick: you and The Story, both stranger
with each re-telling. Drink in hand, you resurrect us
at seventeen, shivering on the front steps in wrinkled
prom clothes, your head bent over mine. You recall
the strange quiet—the brush of breeze, velvet with rain.
The stupid joy. The lit confetti of insects above us as you
leaned in.
From your lips,
we are luminous.
The night you leave,
I watch you go from another porch—tell myself
a different story:
the garden hose was unwound
and weeping over a bald patch of lawn. My parents argued
inside the house. You kissed me softly, clumsily. When you
pulled away, I could see the moth—the way it threw its body
at the bulb. The way it blistered. The curled outline of wings
slowly falling through the air.
Paige Winegar Fetzer is an MFA student at Brigham Young University, where she is studying poetry and working as Editor-in-Chief of BYU’s literary magazine, Inscape. She collects words, rocks, books, and people, and can usually be found in the mountains. Her work has most recently been published/is forthcoming in The Emerson Review, Poetry South, Exponent II, Thimble Lit, Vellichor Lit, and Wayfare Journal.
