Seven short haiku watch moths and butterflies, and the moments are quietly competitive or fragile. A monarch "fills up" on bright orange milkweed as if stopping at a gas station. Someone with a flashlight spots a luna moth from impossibly far away. A bare catalpa tree trembles because hungry caterpillars have eaten its leaves. Hummingbirds fight over flowers, and the one that is left is a hummingbird moth, which looks like a hummingbird but isn't. A goldfinch pushes a worn-out swallowtail off the thistles.
Two poems turn darker. At a candlelight vigil outside a state prison, moths burn in the flames, and the human ritual carries an unintended cost. Meanwhile mating red-spotted purples drift in mid-air, and the line "her wings stop moving" is hard to read: it could be stillness in the act, or something more final.
The speaker mostly observes rather than comments. The mood is curious and affectionate, but it keeps noticing hunger, exhaustion, and death at the edges of beauty.