Cicadas


We hunted the shells, the skins
they left behind, stuck by
their feet to the bark of trees,
as though halfway up
they developed acrophobia
and called it quits on the climb.

Or, like tiny Clark Kents,
they got a call for help
and left their suits behind
to rescue an inch worm
stretched between two twigs,
or a water spider spun
into an unrelenting eddy.

They were events. Their
chir chir chir filled the air.
One day they didn’t exist
for us and the next they did,
out of solid ground
suddenly porous with life.
We collected the shells,

the ones undamaged when the
living ripped the backs
open and moved on—wings
like leaded glass windows,
too grand and beautiful
for those pedestrian cases.

Before their next appearance
topside, we would be gone
from coal country, my father
following a sales job, my
sister and I in better schools,
my mother ever saddened
by separation from family.

Once she asked me,
don’t you miss it, hon,
don’t you miss our life
back home? And I thought she
didn’t know me. No, I said,
this is my home. I was a teenager
and I had transformed.