Poems from the 12-Hour Couplets Contest: Brood X, Elizabeth Johnson

Elizabeth M. Johnson is a lawyer, poet, and transplanted Chicagoan living in Detroit.  She is the granddaughter of immigrants.

Brood X

Before you’re gone again, you’ll leave your mark:
dirt burrows in the yard, the twig’s worn bark.

The paw paw trees will lose their boughs. Cypress,
willow, and ash. Just think how ravenous --

seventeen years! In vast numbers, you sing.
You’re shock and awe, a mating call springing

from a buckled rib, a hollow abdomen.
You’ll leave your mark before you’re gone again.

An ancient symbol of insouciance?
To me, your wide eyes don’t say innocence.

No lovely sibilance, no gentle hiss,
instead continuous, cacophonous,

your whirring cycles faster in the heat.
I’m crunching carcasses under my feet.

Abandoned exoskeletons remain:
you leave your mark. And you will come again.

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