“May I never take this view for granted” is my mantra, aloud, as soon as my eyes inhale the Sandias—sunshine sliding over them each morning as a mother lovingly easing a blanket off her baby. I’m nocturnal. The sunrise is the last thing I see before bed. It’s how I finish my “day”. Before dusk, whenever possible, I rush to some point where I can view the Mesa, changing hues like some dizzying high, while whatever diety sits before the sky like a canvas and brushes in lavenders and oranges until, finally, red. Then all is dark. A narcotic only the heavens could provide. These are two of the many reasons I moved back to this enchanted place, where culture and family has always meant more than fame or fashion. The sun loves Albuquerque how Burque loves its people—passionately. Burque is the sleeve tattoo on the arm of my God.
There are phenomena indigenous to Albuquerque: ten-second rainstorms on a hot day that result in steam rising from every surface. I can watch the land dreaming. Or how lightning strikes through sage bush, misting the city in perfume, Sick! as a compliment (even during a pandemic), or my favorite—how stars festoon into such a collective joy I can read a book of poems outside without any mortal-made light. These are the ways this city shows off.
I am thinking about my mother. She was just as beautiful as this city, and just as impossible to have her beauty recognized. She was white and would only date black men. She was loud and confrontational. She cussed profusely, and was always willing to punch someone in the mouth for calling her outside her name. She, in the end, took her life. She wanted to die on her own terms, with her two good legs functional, before her infected bone marrow kept her bedridden. That’s Burque, beautiful on her own terms, whether the rest of this nations chooses to acknowledge it or not.
As moth season comes to a slow in the last twenty-four hours, I’ve meditated on their almost-intrusive arrival, their blatant occupation and their gentle dissipation. I’ve seen so many sharp jolts of a human body accompanied by shrieks, then a swat of a hand to kill these creatures, akin to reactions often had in the presence of spiders or bees, snakes or flies. It puzzles me, how people see moths as an annoyance or something to fear. It reminds me of the way we gawk at alcoholics riding in the backs of buses on Central—their glassy-filmed eyes and unsteady gaits mimicking the sway in a moth’s clumsy flapping; addicts scurrying the streets at night, forever mistaking the flame of a lighter over a glass pipe for the sun’s promise. These too are moths, not unlike this city, struggling to find their way in the dark.
I admire the chemically addicted, pugilistic in choosing dope over suicide. Whatever it takes to live another day in their traumas and blues, at least for the time being, rushing towards whatever temporary light their realities offer—similar to so many of us who have had an affair outside a marriage, believing the temporary arms of a stranger could ever rescue us from opaque circumstances in our homes. How many things in my life have I overlooked, assumed to be in the way of my serenity, all the while waiting for me to find magic in its presence? Moths burst from cocoons and have little time to learn the world is out to consume them. Children in the Warzone, a couple in which one is about to strike the other any second, for the first time. I admire moths for their undying curiosity, willing to land everything, to touch it all before they die. It’s all I could think about, growing up poor in the projects. I wanted to be everywhere, stood at a shoreline and commit to knowing just how far that ocean stretched.
When I lived here seven years ago, moth season was one of the most fascinating experiences I ever experienced—in fact, the parade of moths—blocking sunlight, papering over a window on a hot afternoon, I applauded their voracity for living. I remember detecting various hums as they trapezed, one wall to another, lulling me into a dream in my dark bedroom. I meditated on how so many of them got inside my home. I thought about the first twenty seconds I watched my son, outside the womb. I pondered, whispering the question, How did you get here?
How did I get here? How did I live fifty years after all the death and dying that happens in poverty? How did I survive long enough to obtain a college degree? How did you make it this far in your life?
The last couple of nights, I was a captive audience. Moths danced throughout my home as if it were a ballroom, leaped around every bright bulb, flashing their new wings to each other, taking turns, warming their new, aerodynamic shapes against the shine. I’m in awe by their compulsion to throw themselves against glass if that’s what it takes to feel the sun. Risk their lives near every candle, fireplace, and stove when the world darkens. I wish I searched the world, ceaselessly for light. Or do I? Have I not spent most of my life, since I was fourteen, after my mother went to prison, searching tirelessly for love in another’s arms? Knowing, without knowing, love was the only answer to my pains. Don’t we all? Do we not look to the sky how a toddle looks to the peek of a guardian, arms raised, eyes flooded, begging to be lifted? Isn’t that an addict? Isn’t that a lover? Isn’t that light?
I believed moths were simply nocturnal butterflies, overlooked and underappreciated. This is partly true. Moths remind me of the working poor. Their uniqueness is in the shapes of their wings. Butterflies rest atop flowers with their wings up whereas moths flatten against surfaces to lay low, hide from predators. I remember my mother spent the week before the welfare check, avoiding the ringing phone. She knew the bill collectors were above, hungry and apathetic. She’d tell me “John, don’t answer that phone.” Moths’ wings are also camouflaged to match their surroundings. Here, moth wings tiger-striped and brown as Burque’s culture, enabling them to hide along the desert in plain sight from birds, bats and spiders.
Their wings, dusted in a powder, are so delicate that one touch by a human finger could ground them for the rest of their lives. How is it something so ginger could frighten the giants we are in comparison? Perhaps it is their vulnerability that frightens us. Maybe this fear many of us harbor is a spiritual gift to the moth, keeping us at a safe distance in order to keep them flying. But what may be a gift to moths is often a curse to ourselves. What darkens our search for light is how we too often avoid the risk of hands near whatever wings we have. Maybe hands are like love: the reward is great but the risk is often greater.
Tonight, as I write this, a moth darted towards a candle, mistook the pool of wax for an oasis, and plunged to its end. I was sad. Somehow, all of these bullets of preponderances lead me to consider our circumstances these recent months. I thought about the struggles against COVID-19 on reservations and the inability of so many to receive decent healthcare. I am thinking about Ahmaud Arbery. I am staring at a picture of my mother, gone now seventeen years, and still, it was like yesterday I reached up to her light, and she carried my limp and sleepy body home. The moths are all but gone, but the lessons stay with us.
John S. Blake is a queer, black, recovering addict. A poet, essayist, and autoethnographer, Blake currently studies poetry at Sierra Nevada College’s MFA program. He facilitates writing workshops centered on navigating toxic masculinity at jails, prisons, juvenile detention centers and universities. A senior editor for Transition Magazine (Harvard, he’s been nominated for a Pushcart Prize (2012) and has been published in Adobe Walls, Criminal Class Press, Malpais, Naugatuck River Review, Red Fez, and numerous other literary journals. He currently resides in Albuquerque.