Cicada
The first one appears at the lawn’s edge,
stranded on the soft curve of a nymphal back,
legs waving like wind-caught blades,
the grass too yielding—
how easy it would be to give in, let darkness
reclaim what it has only just relinquished.
The struggle familiar, I offer a finger, feel
the soft prick of legs finding purchase,
carry them to the trunk of a grand elm.
Soon every notch of bark, every weathered
fence post will bear the ghostly forms of those
who have risen from dirt, from their own
blooming bodies into winged being, shivering
the damp air with their theremin wail.
But it’s the struggle that lingers in my mind
as I walk to the lake on pavement still
absent the brittle crack of chitin—
how it must have felt, even in the fear
of that helpless beginning, to stumble from
soil’s black hush and find yourself gazing
cow-eyed into the blue above, more brilliant
and endless than you could have imagined.
Of course you’d move earth to see it, thrash
every inch of your frail body just to become
what will lift you toward its light.
Sixteen Wasps Dead in the Door Frame
I watched them last autumn in wild orgy,
one hapless wasp easing through the door’s seam,
pheromone reek luring another, then another—
thirteen more—each funneling through a rift
they would not find again, clattering against the glass
in a last primal thrust before winter’s snow-damped hush.
Freeze after freeze they died as they’d come—
one, then another—wings faltering like
the last tremors of a plucked string, bodies
tumbling from the screen in a soundless rush.
How strange to be a creature that survives winter,
awake and shuffling through the graveyard in
boot-clad feet while the world sleeps, buries its dead
beneath the slate slab of sky, white drift of marble.
This morning I unlatch the door to greet spring’s arrival,
startling as a warm wind rattles the husks, the papery duff
of dried wings, rending thorax from abdomen
like a snapped strand of beads, while somewhere
among the greening trees, new broods rouse from
silken cells knowing only sunlight and wingbeat.
Zoe Boyer was raised in Evanston, Illinois on the shore of Lake Michigan, and completed her MA in Creative Writing among the ponderosa pines in Prescott, Arizona. Her work has appeared in such publications as The New York Times, Poetry South, Kelp Journal, Plainsongs, RockPaperPoem, About Place, West Trade Review, Little Patuxent Review, The Penn Review, and Pleiades, and has been nominated for Best of the Net.
Header photo by Pavan Prasad, courtesy Pixabay.
