Description
“No butterflies in the desert. No shells in the desert. Naked and authentic. Change.”
In 8 weeks everything changed. That is where this collection takes its name. No Butterflies in the Desert gathers 28 poems and one letter by David Bryan Smith about love, regret, and the slow work of becoming someone new.
The book opens in illusion, with “Pick a Card”: a colored scarf flies into the wind and turns into a dove, a card is picked, a hand is taken. A love may be “an illusion or the real thing.” Then the illusions fall away. What is left are the things never said (“I should have called you that night”), the plain, frightened question “Can we talk?”, and the long search for someone who is gone.
At the center of the book is the desert itself: a caterpillar that dies there, a voice treading water that insists “I am not adrift in the sea,” a shadow that moves wherever the speaker moves. From there the poems turn toward beginning again: a new love, a cup of coffee (“Coffee heals all wounds”), the heat of a southern summer, and a blank page that arrives every morning.
Some poems are short and song-like, built on refrains you can almost hear. Others run as prose poems that read like confessions. David’s are direct and unguarded. The book closes with a single letter, “Dear Brian,” part verse and part prose.
No Butterflies in the Desert asks what is left when the old self is gone. One of its answers: “We are the authors of our lives. Fill the page.”
Includes a PDF (44 pages) and an EPUB.
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