Afterlife

—after the exhibition “Burying Painting,” James Perkins, 2025

Entombed in her pearly self-spun cocoon, silkworm dreams her becoming, a being freshly winged in soft spangled flight. But is abruptly shucked, limp, gray, from the harvest boil and her thread unspun. The silk woven, with her sisters’ strands, into gossamer sweeps of sylvan glimmer, sunset fuchsia, moon glow. Which the artist selects from last year’s fashions, for swathing raw wood he buries in desert sand beneath creosote, sleeping through the seasons. 

Within the fabric’s weft and warp, silkworm wakes, a nose’s cool damp pressed to her presence. She is sun-striped, coyote-nipped, wind-ripped, time-twisted. She’s harvested once again, this time as nature-worn weather work. The artist assembles the silk’s impressions into enticing arrays. Selects, for framing, desirable fractals of soft spangled light. 

In the museum, silkworm muses on this mutation, her afterlife as artifact, as art. All around her, mouths circle into o’s, exhaling awe; eyes search her shimmer, seeking reverie. Her exhumation, luminous tonight.

Camille LeFevre writes from the unceded ancestral lands of the Yavapai and Apache in Northern Arizona. Her essay, “Body Topography,” published in The Dodge, was selected for the 2026 Best of the Net Anthology. Her work appears in Wild Roof Journal, Thimble, Bridge Eight, Metphrastics, and Fugue. Her debut poetry collection, Sandstone and Kin, will be published in October by Finishing Line Press.