Guess who?

Yay, you got it, it’s indeed me!

I’m tired, y’all — this is more challenging than I anticipated. Challenging in terms of creation and production, but also in terms of sending work out into the void of this series of tubes we call the Internet.

ANYway, hi, thanks for being here.

This week’s poem is about my father, cicadas, and ingrown hair. If you’d like to tell me what you think it’s about, about, feel free to let me know — I’m stumped.

Here’s a photo of my father and me as fashion models:

Brood X

As a child, I had a little box in which I collected animal fragments:butterflies and butterfly wings, the skeleton of a baby bird,probably some rocks with lots of personality, and molted cicada shells.

Soon, trillions of periodical cicadas will invade the Eastern United States.These aren’t the same cicadas whose exoskeletons I collected in Montreal,but this brood only appears every 17 years, so it’s headline news.

My father texts me one such headline, that cicadas are in fact edible.They taste like tofu, apparently. My father muses that my boyfriendmight therefore like them. My boyfriend isn’t much of a carnivore.

Yesterday, I hurt my neck. My father told me to tell my boyfriendto press very hard on the knot in my neck muscle to ease the tension.My father says my boyfriend should be able to feel the blood flow back in.

An origin story: Once, my father found a dead baby bird in our old backyard. He buried it, so that we could dig up the bones a year later and add the skeleton to my little box. A more honest time capsule.

My father has a tube of topical anaesthetic cream ready to applyto a spot along my jawline from which he will remove a hair that has been growing under my skin for a couple years now.

My father will sterilize a pin with a flame and squeeze a quarter of his face around a magnifying monocle. My father will gently excavate the hair, which will be shockingly long and dark, dark brown. My father’s hair is dark, dark brown.

Eventually, everything comes out or up or through: dormant burrowed cicadas,a painful knot in a muscle, a hair that’s now lapped its own semi-hidden spiral,an off-white skeleton with an infant beak. Maybe I could cook a meal of all four.

Thanks for reading and/or listening and/or sharing! Feedback is always most welcome:

See you next Monday for another gay little poem. Although this is a ~personal exercise~ in ~creativity~ and ~productivity~, it also stems from a desire to ~connect~ in this weird and wild situation. So, thanks for connecting! Find me on Twitter/Instagramif you’d like!

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