I forgot to water the mint this morning before I left and when I came home it was limp, every leaf from the top ones the caterpillars keep chewing off in the night to the lush overhang they haven’t found yet. The June bugs have discovered it, though. Last night I found one clinging to an underleaf, not eating but resting before careening crazily off again. I liked June bugs as a kid because they were so dumb and easy to catch. They were less interesting than fireflies but there were always more of them, banging into the screen door, skritching around on the porch in an uneven spiral with one crumpled wing sticking out from under their beetle shell. If Opal had been awake, I’d have called her to come look. I would have wanted to show her how to pluck the beetle from its leaf and hold it belly-up to watch its legs circle like a wind-up toy’s.
I hope I wouldn’t actually have done it. Showing her would be overstepping. If she’s going to be cruel in the way children are cruel, she should have to think of it herself and live with how it feels, remembering her whole life what it was like to pinch an ant’s head from its body, or dig a snail out of its shell.
The mint has perked up, that’s the nice thing about mint, it comes back.
How to cite: Nogues, Collier. “Just Another Day: Collier Nogues.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 4 Jun. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/06/04/collier-another-day.
Collier Nogues is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She writes at the intersection of digital and documentary poetics, with an emphasis on making connections across decolonisation and demilitarisation movements in the U.S. and in the Pacific. Her poetry collections include the hybrid print/interactive volume The Ground I Stand On Is Not My Ground (2015) and On the Other Side, Blue (2011). She is a core collaborator in the Yale-NUS project DOCUMENT, which gathers artists, writers, and historians to explore trans-disciplinary approaches to archives. She also edits poetry for Juked. Visit her website for more information. [Collier Nogues and chajournal.blog.]
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