Cicadas

Steven Baird

Listen, back when you were a drinking man: You heard the cicadas churn their wind-up poetry, elegies from craunching throats. The parking lot was a checkerboard of F-150’s and Wranglers, intersected by broken yellow lines, and the overhead lights shredded their windshields. There was a cornfield beyond the blacktop, and it sighed like corduroy, and it had a womanly fragrance. The wind, a tattooed thug, pulled you to the fence line and forced you stare at the mathematical spaces between you and everything else.

You warbled and fidgeted, and sprayed an arch of piss along the posts. You cried for the dark to swallow you; instead, the Neil Diamond karaoke grew louder. Holly Holy became your prayer, and then vanished. Then, Don’t go breaking my…, but it was too late. A fumble of pocket keys, and then no, you would walk. To rest in the corn, into her trembling, caramel arms. The cicadas would tell you what you needed to know.

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