Today's poem is by Bethany Jarmul

The Hope Museum
       

A dozen purple-dotted butterflies, dead and papery and pinned through their slender middles. When you lean in, eye an inch from the glass bubble dome, they twitch, as if the life is not completely strangled from their antennas. Then a pair of newborn booties, pristine and hand-kit and cloud-blue. A still-wet life buoy. A shooting star inside a dark snowless snow globe. A dove with a branch in its beak, stuffed like an olive. A letter from overseas, still sealed. A note, once football-folded, now opened and crinkly: "Do you like me? Check YES [ ] or NO [ ]." A wedding band. A white flag. A rainbow, recreated with a lightbulb and humidifier. A wallet bursting with crinkled black-and-white photos. A paystub, a passport, a train ticket. A candle, always lit, except when it's not. A wishing well with hundreds of pennies green with wrinkles. A blueprint for an invention, its use unknown. A dozen IVF needles. A dropper frozen mid-drop with a once-believed cancer cure. A hand-sized lighthouse with battery-powered light. An umbrella, a rain jacket, and artificial rain. A maroon rabbit's foot and dozens of four-leaf clovers, dried. An assortment of rosary beads and prayer shawls and prayer mats of all colors. A 90-day sober token. A giant drill that once saved 22 miners stuck underground. A peace treaty, unsigned, with a leaking pen.

Copyright © 2025 Bethany Jarmul All rights reserved
from Lightning Is a Mother
ELJ Editions
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission