Lynn Shaffer 

The Mothman: First Love 


           For a thirteen month period . . . locals reported sightings of the Mothman in the area. . . 
              On December 15, 1967 the 700 foot Silver Bridge connecting Ohio to West Virginia
              collapsed . . . killing 46 people. After the catastrophe the Mothman sightings ended.  
                                                                                                                               ~ Ed Lamaze, online blog 

 

Despite eighty miles 
and numerous hills,

a girl with her chin to the sky
in a town with no stoplights 
heard the beating of filigree wings.
The breeze carried wood pulp and the static
electricity of things unknown.
She’d read about the chosen, 
a black man and his white wife
exhaling, reprieved from a moonless road,
so why not a girl who hears trees
move, herself an always just-plucked string.

The stars stopped their vibrations. A bridge
unembraced to the tune of “Silent Night.”


Lynn Shaffer won the Morehead State University New Writers Award in 2006 for her poetry collection Persistence of Vision, which was published in 2008 by Wind Publications. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Pisgah Review, Louisiana Literature, Mid-American Review, Wind, The Journal of Kentucky Studies, and The Heartland Review. She lives in Paris, Kentucky, with her husband and daughter and is an associate professor of English at Maysville Community and Technical College.


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