ISSUE 7

Leia Bradley

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Picking Up Cicada Carcasses in Texas

What do I really want out of this? I’m waiting for Texas to tell me herself.
                It’s a good a place as any to lose your goddamn mind—eat the muscadine,
drink the moonshine, see how far you can spit the watermelon seeds—
                let’s forget how much time we’ve tasted
and spat back across the yard—daring youth to damn us early,
                and you’re talking about forever
when you ain’t even got me yet.
                This summer’s got an appetite for consequence—
shit’s so slow here it makes me hungry
                for things I’d never have the stomach
for if it wasn’t over a hundred and those cicadas, lullabying the heat—
                what do god’s best degenerates eat? Lord knows nature loves a loud fuck
and I’m looking for a home big enough
                to scream your name for hours inside it,
no one around but the bugs and the bunnies, and we go at it like them,
                leaping into down into each other’s lives
with no return in mind.
                But you can get so mean, and then it bricks up in me again—
here it is, the old familiar. The toss-turn of nausea, the churl of the tide, tired
                of wondering when your tongue will flick back to kind, or when
this will feel like real life. Maybe it’s now more
                about the liquid drip of the ache for me,
like an IV or
                an icicle in spring,
a popsicle down the knuckles—maybe it’s enough
                to lick the saccharine off the wrist, the place I stopped
trying to kill myself at. Good job, says no one. But I know
                what I've done. And you always, eventually, force me to leave you. You get so bad
on purpose. I know
                endings are for people
who don’t have to remind themselves to care. I know life
                isn’t just winging as fast as you can until death,
but I’m not waiting for a mouth like yours
                to tell me any answers worth keeping.​​

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