cicadas raze you've made your last mating call. in the frail flatness of your current form, you resemble nothing so much as a dormant incandescent bulb with its brains blown out. i can't tell wizened wing from abdomen. one black eye stares back at me, misplaced and made menacing by the open mouth of your paraprocts. fifty feet away there's another just like you, slow cooking in this cruel sun. 230905 ... nr every time i notice them i remember the last meaningful time i noticed them. 230905 ... nr they capture the oppressive heat of the season in the most nostalgic way 230905 ... ovenbird I am seven and the summer has stretched out for an eternity. It rolls out ahead of me endlessly, every moment an invitation. And in some expansive afternoon I am poking around in the front yard, lazing in the arms of our huge maple tree, and my eyes catch gold. Clinging to the bark of the maple is a beautiful terror, a thing that is both there and not there, the three dimensional imprint of a cicada nymph, the exoskeleton left behind when it molted and emerged an adult with only a brief frenzied life left to live. I marvel at the ability of something to throw off it's own skin and become something else. I shiver as I notice the place where the body split open to let this new iteration emerge. I wonder if it hurt. I touch the empty shell with reverence. I am small but I already know when I have witnessed something holy. 250328 what's it to you? who go blather from