A girl scooped up a caterpillar and put it in a mason jar
with some dirt and grass and leaves.
For a week it pedaled around aimlessly and then stopped.
For another week the girl left the rigid fluffy circle segment
on her window sill. She tried to figure out
why the caterpillar died but the grass and leaves were still green,
and how it lived without fogging up the glass
the way her breath did when she breathed into the jar
to make sure it had air. She thought about breathing
and why wasn’t her breath good enough?
Terry Trowbridge’s poems have appeared in The New Quarterly, Carousel, subTerrain, paperplates, The Dalhousie Review, untethered, The Nashwaak Review, Orbis, Snakeskin Poetry, M58, CV2, Brittle Star, Lady Lazarus Experimental Poetry, The American Mathematical Monthly, Canadian Woman Studies, The Mathematical Intelligencer, The Canadian Journal of Family and Youth, The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, (parenthetical), Borderless Magazine, Fine Lines, and many, many more. His lit crit has appeared in Ariel, Hamilton Arts & Letters, Episteme, Studies in Social Justice, Rampike, and The /t3mz/ Review.