Not a Cicada Poem

It’s about fireflies,

how, as a child, my mother would fashion

their abdomens into earrings.

Those nights, I’d cry, not

at the cruelty, but the feeling,

the glow on my earlobes

a brittle-cut gorgeous.

While we wore the jewelry, we’d pitch

baseballs over the grass, watch the beanfields

frame the sunset as it deadweight-dropped

over us, draped us in starred space

where we, too, were blinking,

half-dead satellites. I never liked

the light I carried. I never wanted

to burden other bodies

the way their bones burdened me.

When the cicadas came, I worried

what my mother would make of them:

their shells finger puppets on the shelf,

how I’d hate the way they felt on my skin

but I’d never tell.