Hermes finds you, moth-chewed girl with
 holes where your heart should lie, 
at a bed rest somewhere in Georgia’s mouth.
 He asks you where you’re going.
 You ask him to show you what it means to be a butterfly.

He takes you to Ares, to the waste of a man
 with two jobs and a crippling mortgage,
with too much bottled anger to really tell you, who
 looks too much like your father in a time glass, but he says this- “To be free is to fight, to feel bones 
crack 
beneath your skin, 
to feel Olympus quiver 
every time your lungs decide
 it is time to shake the footholds of mountains.”

He takes you to Aphrodite, a rat-tailed girl between homes,
 two children that run from her hands every time she tries
 to show them the love her own mother hid, her own mother gave
 with restrictions. She smiles, a worn and weary bend of starlight
 across that drawstring mouth of hers and says- “To be happy is not to make the same
 mistakes 
that those before us made. Try your best
 not to be a repetition of history.”

He takes you to the twins, Apollo and Artemis,
 two sewer children with only the sticks of their foster home 
to play archery with, to play hunters and sun riders. They drag 
the sunlight home, with scars among their laughter, 
and they say- “To have fun is not to forget
 who turned their corn crumbs into meals for you.”

Finally, he takes you to Zeus.

The lightning-wielder is old now, built from a life where
 even though he held the cosmos like marbles in his hands, 
even though mountains fell to his whim, gods return to dust when
 they are struck too hard by lightning. He downs a scotch and tells you, softly,
 with no thunder caught in his esophagus- “To be a butterfly is not to follow
 every light you see.”

When Hermes drops you off back in Georgia, 
he asks you what you learned, what shakes your rattlesnake heart like when you were five 
and your father was too far gone to see the fall of Olympus 
in your chest, what now hangs across your bones like the laundry 
your mother
 never forgot to put out for you.

What makes your smile draw up, a mockery of the crescent, 
a pale comparison to the sun, as you come to terms with these 
people, these gods in mortal shells, 
these moths dressed as butterflies.

You tell him, "You're looking an awful lot like the light right now.”