Elegy to the Cicada

Has anyone mourned your death,
or were we content on crushing your
frail brown skeletons under our boots -
we who would swerve to avoid a tire-flattened
groundhog but hesitate to push your
remains to the side to clear a path?
Even the vegans and the Buddhist monks
winced at your song; pressing
their pious hands to their ears, they must
have prayed for your death as some cheeky child
pulled your filmy wings from your molting
bodies. Maybe we're envious of a life of
fucking and dying, while we're still
trudging hopelessly among the
trees you coat like caramel, the same
ones we passed seventeen years ago.

Fire Island, 1991

Look how my mother's wrist hangs limp as she points,
as if there's something tangible in the waves
that soak the sand and seep towards us. Our
skin is drenched the color of cream-drenched coffee,
softened by five days of Fire Island sun. Watch
the wind clutch our clothes and try to pull us back,
as if there's something dangerous in the water
that already has us buried up to our ankles.
The fabric clings to my curveless young body,
breastless, hipless, and pantsless; here my mom
didn't fret about what boys would think. Under
swirls of white and gaping holes of blue,
as if the world was never proven spherical,
as if Jesus were never so blessed, I look ready -
longing to skim across the surface with my
blister-kissed heels, to challenge the wind and leave
my unwashed hair fluttering behind me, to run
as if muscles couldn't ache and lungs couldn't tire,
to see what would happen if I jumped right off
the edge of this little Atlantic Ocean.

Love Me Like -- (A Found Poem)

Love me like
the seventies -
aggressively
bantering
room by room;
get bossy, and
use
me.

Braceless

The Rockwell gracing these
sterile walls
held a child and
her cheerless, rouged
pout -
a white dress,
a contorted doll, and
a magazine -
as his rubber-clad
fingers forced
the chapped
corners of my lips
wide,
wide open.
His breath was dense,
heavy behind
his mask
and how badly I wanted
him to say
Rinse. This
would be the last time
after the yanking
and scraping and pulling;
the last time
my smile
would be barred behind
metal, with their ever-
alternating décor:
usually blue.
I closed my eyes,
studied the darkness there –
the shapes and colors
and how they faded,
until he said
Rinse. Then –
white teeth, white walls,
and that fleeting sense
of flawlessness,
like Rockwell’s girl
must have felt
with that magazine in her lap.