Alicia Wright
Good American Speech
It’s cicadas or it’s crickets
or it’s something else entirely—
it’s whatever a peeper is.
I lost it somewhere, mashed it to paste
between my teeth; no buggy, no crawdad,
nobody redding up the table for supper,
but something Mid-Atlantic—
crooked on the tongue and never fit
enough for the stage.
We’re all Shakespeare in the foothills
here, damp clover clinging to our ankles,
but the crick bleeds in:
I can’t explain the night without it,
or the jellied mass of eggs sprouting limbs
and crawling for the hemlock,
can’t tell the truth about the water’s bite
or our clothes in wrinkled piles on the bank.
I can’t spell the name of the bone-white shells
raked by the palmful from the mud,
thin as fingernails,
quiet as parentheses.
No One Said Simon
She’s been trying to die for years
and here she is now, finally
but some gummy analgesic
has swaddled her iridescent—
I am my father in the doorway,
my mother, myself in OshKosh,
the violent shock of June,
and the arms dragging her
gasping from the pool.
I am not the neon frisbee
abandoned at the hem
of tide-wash.
I’ve seen the rippled VHS, seen
the Little Mermaid towel caping
her peeling shoulders;
press rewind and she is acid-
washed and losing a game
of Simon Says
and I am on my knees
at the table, humming-
bird cake beyond reach.
Alicia Wright (she/her) is a writer from Appalachia. She holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Antiphony Journal, The Inflectionist Review, River and South Review, Thimble, and elsewhere.
