A bottle and Styrofoam container against the passionflowers
the silver-streaked scrub hopper, took to the chestnut light:

what we resist, breathlessly we visit in our sleep
like the Fritillary among the bog, drawn from long nectar pints:

when I was born, I stood origin-less like the hunger along the Rio Grande.
Among the stray flight on brush stalk, a selective mutism

reticulated, variegated, an artifact that crossed from Mexico
from Sonoran folkloric sustenance, and in the gulf, chestnut sunlight,

stamped out an unseen pirouette, breathless, like a Cordera
sung to later generations struggling to resist, inherited

on a day-laborer’s rucksack, Regal Fritillaries disappeared from the East
in the late 1970s; now a Calvary belts out in strands along abandoned Forts

near dried-cracked Pastures: the softest part of a rose preexisted
the emerging violets in their fragility last forever:

no one noticed, not even in a eulogy, when the last one dropped. 

– Jonathan Andrew Pérez, Esq.