Manduca

Abstract

Manduca Victoria Hudson (bio) The idea comes first, then the materials. — Tatsuo Ishimoto I. The house in Michigan had a garden. My mom & stepdad sowed it neatly: sunflowers, corn. Tomatoes, lettuce. In Japan, gardens bring the sea & the mountains. In Michigan, gardens bring tomato worms: green & flailing. Nine, tasked with their removal, I collected them in a bucket & dumped them in a clearing. I understood that they would die, lacking tomatoes, but this was preferable to their yellow insides on my hands. Left to pupate, they would’ve turned into large hawkmoths; had I known this, I couldn’t have killed them. II. In another reality, I don’t pluck the hornworms from their solanaceous host plants. They create small spaces [End Page 171] underground, turn reddish-brown. A cuticle forms around their mouthparts. Lovely, quiet, private, intimate: histolysis, histogenesis. Decay & reformation. Differentiation of cells. First, the idea: suggestion of wings. Then the materials: scales, to keep warm. Hawkmoths usually eclose in the morning. In this reality, morning is my favorite time of day: I watch them emerge from the sharp black Michigan dirt. III. Adult hawkmoths are the primary pollinators of Datura innoxia, whose alkaloids cause delirium in humans (talking to dead relatives, rolling imaginary cigarettes) & also, it’s been suggested, in moths—they wobble about drunkenly after feeding on Datura, but tend to return again & again. Oh, love: chaos in the body. Dysphagia, diplopia. Dry, hot skin. One Utah gardener reports a hawkmoth, high as a kite, tucked deep inside a Jimsonweed corolla. [End Page 172] IV. In Greece in 2010, seven people were hospitalized after eating Datura when they confused the leafy plant for nearby blites. Besides the heat in their palms, their pupils like black holes, they probably thought they were losing their minds. It’s easy to forget yourself; you only have to fall in love or trip too hard or glimpse a hawkmoth, hummingbird-like, suspended midair. Idea first: I play along. I dress myself each day. Then, if I’m lucky, materials: a house, blue-gray, like the sea. A garden. [End Page 173] Victoria Hudson Victoria Hudson is an MFA student and recipient of a Lily Peters Fellowship at the University of Arkansas. Her poems are published or forthcoming in jubilat, Passages North, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. She is a poetry editor at the Arkansas International. Copyright © 2021 Pleiades Press