Undertow
The unlabeled bottle contained these little
yellow pills with letters and numbers—SR6—
engraved in them and I wondered when I’d
taken those and what they were. Another bottle
was full of large, oblong, white pills, no writing
on them. There were bottles of nasal spray,
dust-covered, and some herbs, like milk
thistle and lion’s mane and Korean
ginseng. I’d awakened one night in
September to a black witch moth opening
and closing its wings in the spray of half-
light where only a nightlight shone.
They say if you are ill and the moth visits
all four corners of a room in your house
you’re basically done for. I’d had a headache
and plugged-up ears for a week. Without
blinking my eyes I snaked my hand under
the covers and tried to awaken Peggy, who was snoring
lightly. The moth was like two halves of
an old Viking vessel. It must have weighed
2000 pounds. Peggy stopped snoring
and I could see her eyes glowing in the darkness
we were sunk inside of, the deep end
of the mortality pool. (She’d also had a sore
throat the last few days.) Then I noticed
the two pink pills on my bedside table,
something I’d read can make one feel more
optimistic about reality (available without a
prescription). I managed to swallow them
without scaring the black witch (I chewed
them, as no water was readily available). I
whispered then, without opening my mouth,
like a ventriloquist might. Mmotthhh. . .Peggy
only blinked her bright eyes in the dark. The moth
lay flat on the wall, like an open bible. I didn’t
want it to start visiting different parts of the bedroom.
It batted its massive wings a few times, almost
as if it’d been startled, and the resulting wind
moved across the bed, blowing Peggy’s hair
back away from her forehead. The black witch moth
inhabits the Southern United States down into Brazil
but in rare instances can be found as far north
as Duluth, Minnesota. Our bed was in rural
Indiana, outside of Captainlainberg, which is 38
miles east of Plymouth, which is 34 miles south
of South Bend, which is where Peg and I both
had jobs. Our house was in the country on a river.
I kept hallucinating the moth as a clock on some
make-believe wall, as if in a castle in Transylvania,
the numerals more decorative than legible. If I
concentrated quite hard I thought I could hear
a ticking sound coming from the brain of the
velvety insect. It had been twenty minutes
since I’d awakened to the black witch
in our room, ten since I’d downed the optimism pills.
I tried to think about what I’d seen on the news
but it just made things confusing (gold dust had drifted
off the black witch’s wings due to the disturbance).
There were other pills in my bedside drawer—
yellow ones and brown ones, some with a coating
and some without. Chemicals danced at their
very centers. I remembered an ad on YouTube
for Dupixent (I could recall the music that
accompanied the ad), including the fact that by taking
Dupixent you might die but ask your doctor
about once-a-day Dupixent. I heard Peggy make
a humming noise and I followed her eyes.
The moth had lifted its wings like a crinoline
wedding gown and was tip-toeing sideways on its
many dainty feet. Dawn was breaking, and as the moth
drew closer to the window it shuddered,
light being absorbed into its intricately patterned
wings. It was still dark where we lay, as
if we had awakened at the bottom of ten feet
of blackwater water in the Okefenokee swamp.
Small shrimp-like creatures spun past. I feared
the arrival of crocodiles. We survived that night,
Peggy and I, and woke to coffee and scrambled
eggs and toast and the New York Times on our
screened-in porch. A great blue heron lifted
from the river and rose into the sky and flew in circles
for several quiet minutes and then landed about
five feet from where it had originally been feeding.
DAVID DODD LEE is the author of eleven books of poetry, including the forthcoming book of collages, erasure poems, and original poems, entitled Unlucky Animals (January, 2024). His poems most recently have appeared in New Ohio Review, Ocean State Review, Guesthouse, Copper Nickel, TriQuarterly, The Nation, and Willow Springs. He writes and makes visual art and kayaks in Northern Indiana, where he lives on the St. Joseph River. He is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University South Bend, where he is also Editor-in-Chief of 42 Miles Press, as well as the online literary magazine The Glacier.