Featured Poem II • January 2015

The Nightflies

Sheree Renée Thomas

Illustration by Tamara Natalie Madden

I remember the place where nightflies sing like stars their gilded wings reflect the dark moon’s glide metallic shimmer, rhythmic hum beat out a windblown pattern foretell melodic monsoons and electric rain showers Always they came in the monsoon nights the clouds angry and invisible in the luminous sky, the submerged fields lit by black lightning, its lingering sulphuric smell a pheromone the air heavy with the scent of storms that do not break the skies grown dense, exhale anticipation And suddenly the night air would be gauze wings, silent inevitable as desire how the light caught the dark gleam of bodies pale arcs plunging to fire that brief gossamer blaze like hearts that love only when burned Mornings after the storm my sisters would sweep out piles of pale wings, torn and shimmerless . . . I remember the wet trembling when we were like nightflies blind bodies crawling antlike in desperate circles flung out in deep space searching for the flame

Sheree with her youngest daughter, Jada. Photo by Liz Roberts.

Sheree Renée Thomas, a native of Memphis, is the 2015 Lucille Geier Lakes Writer-in-Residence at Smith College. A Cave Canem and New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, her work also appears in Callaloo, storySouth, the New York Times, the Washington Post, as well as in anthologies, including The Moment of Change, 80! Memories and Reflections on Ursula K. LeGuin, Mojo: Conjure Stories, Hurricane Blues, Bum Rush the Page, The Ringing Ear, MYTHIC 2, and So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy. Sheree edited Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (2001 and 2005 World Fantasy Awards). She is the author of Shotgun Lullabies: Stories & Poems (Aqueduct Press) and has a graphic novel forthcoming from Rosarium Publishing. You can read more about her at her blog, Black Pot Mojo.