At the park with my son
on my hip we walk from
trunk to trunk scouting
cicada husks. The trees
hiss. His thighs clamp
my waist as sound swells
around us. We are five
months into a game
neither of us know
how to play. We dart
between patches
of shade and sweat
pools in his armpits,
on his scalp, his whole body
sticky with it. I point
to the slit where it left
itself, slip his finger in
and tell him the story
of his birth, how when
he was pulled from me
I shushed the room
of mouths that erupted
glad to hear the cry
finally emerge from
his lungs, proving
he was alive, that he is
like one in this way,
his tiny body amplifying
its own sound. He swipes
the hull off the bark
watching its kaleidoscopic
heart split more open
as it falls to the ground,
and above us their song
wails on, sung from
the drum flexing in-
side the tymbal basin
we’re among now
after the long years.
Deep summer so hot
our eyes burn witness-
ing this quick last yawn
of their long life spent
mostly underground.
A year ago the sound was
so strong is this a good cry?
I begged the midwife.
She flicked his sole
and his voice switched on
like that. I let him touch
the husk, confident
no one else has. He has not
touched anyone but me
or his father for over
half of his life. He touches
the faces of his grandparents
on the screen he holds
with both hands and leans in
to kiss them
on the mouth.
Where is your nose? we ask
and he scratches my mother’s
on the screen. He thinks
our masks are a game and laughs
like when we play
dĂłnde está JoaquĂn?
The word for these
means things stripped
from the body and I
want to tell him
there’s a vastness between
pull and strip as he bucks
on my hip calling
for the streetlamp
he sees at the edge
of the park but know
he can’t grasp it
yet. If he saw them now
in the flesh, would he know
to touch them, how to
kiss someone
else’s mouth?
The cicadas hiss
all the way home.
When we reach the porch
he grunts and points up
to the corner where
he sees a bee slink
into a hole smaller
than its own body.
We do this all again
tomorrow, our only
outing, and sometimes
it is days before
we leave the house.
What happens now
after the flesh
has been pulled
from the flesh, body
from body? I think
of him and still milk
comes all this time later.
More and more
I am convinced
it is not a leaving
but a slipping
more into, becoming
more of itself like wounds
worn like a skin that once
protected it but that it
no longer needs, intuiting
the only way through
the pain is through it.
Dreaming that night
he shrieks and I know
he is trapped in the sound
box, thousands
of winged things
he can’t see clicking
around him. Shhh
no, no, little kiwi,
I was just singing
in my dreams, go back to sleep
I whisper and pull him
him into me, waking him
just enough to ensure
he doesn’t slip back in-
to it. Light shifts in
from the lamp
outside. All night
the cicadas sing and
slip into more
of themselves in this fatal
phase waning thin
as a fingernail toward their
final dark. Before I fall
back asleep I think
of the lilies my husband
brought home those
months ago when
the nymphs were still
nymphs beneath us,
the fur on the wide
white petals’ thighs
sprung like new hair
and the black swirl
a galaxy in the center
of our son’s young head
posed beside them
in the polaroid, smaller
than one flower’s wing-
span, before every body
posed a threat of in-
fecting us. The trees
go quiet. After the molt
ends we watch the bees
glut up the wild side
of the roses. He learns
teeth, ear, toes, tongue
in one morning
and I am amazed
by how far back
his memory goes—that, still
months later, he points
to the hole on the porch
from the one time
we saw the one bee—
afraid of how much of
this he’ll remember.
—
Caitlin Roach earned an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is an assistant professor-in-residence at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. A finalist for the National Poetry Series 2019 Open Competition, her poems appear in jubilat, Narrative, Best New Poets, Tin House, The Iowa Review, Colorado Review, and Poetry Daily, among other publications. You can find more of her work online at caitlinroach.com.