Business Ethics

In the hottest months we hunted
               and traded their bodies: cicadas’ alien husks 
still clinging to the dogwoods,
               monarch wings resplendent as church windows, 
the dead june bug’s
               lustrous exoskeleton alive with light.
Neighborhood kids
               dull with the long suburban summer, 
we became sharp-eyed
               collectors, resilient hagglers. These fragile 
remnants were our currency.
               We were proud and greedy, the allure of business 
already softening our principles.
               White linens and gift boxes, table runners 
and doilies—we stole
               from our parents, dreaming of the finest backdrops 
for our driveway displays,
               our precious dead arranged carefully atop 
Mother’s best napkins.
               We shooed away the younger kids, afraid 
their uncertain steps
               would crush our inventory, or they would pocket 
some good find, eager consumers
               oblivious to the workings of our modest economy.
We wined and dined
               each other with cold glasses of lemonade 
as we scurried between
               our miniature storefronts, our dealings covetous 
and uncompromising.
               A younger boy, in search of his own profits, once tried 
to join our market—
               he brought a jar of fireflies collected the night before,
now heaped like a small pile
               of black beans against the glass floor. When he shook 
the jar, trying to coax them
               out of death, they rattled like a sad maraca.
None of us were fooled.
               He was too young to understand the transgressions 
that are permissible
               in the pursuit of fortune, and those 
that are not.

Read more from Issue 19.1.