by Allison Zhang

The first time I heard them, I thought the power lines were on fire.
Their bodies click open like rusted latches, wings lit with dust.
A boy down the street ties thread to their legs,
lets them rise like paper kites above his roof.

In biology class, we learned their mouths pierce bark
the way a nail enters plaster. I couldn’t stop picturing
my grandmother’s hands, pinning laundry to the line,
each clothespin a tiny wound in the fabric.

The cicadas disappear for years, then come back changed,
their husks gripped to tree trunks,
brittle as the portraits in my mother’s closet
where no one says the names out loud anymore.

Some say they scream because their bodies burn
from the inside. Some say the sound is joy.
Once, I held one too long and it split in my palm,
a noise sharp enough to scatter the dogs in the alley.

A cicada can live underground longer than a country lasts.
They rise, mate, die. The ground keeps its own calendar.
I imagine one burrowed beneath the house I grew up in,
still pulsing, waiting for the right year to climb out.

Tonight the air swells with them.
I hear my father sharpening a knife in the kitchen,
a rhythm almost identical to their cry.
He works the blade until it shines, then stops—
and the silence is louder than any chorus in the trees.

Allison Zhang is a poet and writer based in Los Angeles. A bilingual speaker of English and Mandarin, she writes about inheritance and the quiet ruptures of daily life. She was a finalist for the Rattle Poetry Prize, and her work appears in ONE ART, Pithead Chapel, and others.