Root beer and doritos for breakfast
I’m sending up smoke signals in a cicada summer
smelling like how childhood felt when
grasshoppers were abundant
and everything the sunlight touched was ours

We used to drown the silkworms
in buckets of paint water,
and our father didn’t mind
because otherwise they’d kill the trees
and that was god’s creation

Us cul-de-sac kids kicked cans
until mothers called from front porches
“dinner’s ready, come wash your hands!”
Sweat-smudged faces running
with promises to return, bellies full

Weekends spent watching the sun set
over a glistening aluminum-cool pool
smack in the middle of the cow field,
so high up you could watch the storms roll in
for hours before hearing the first thunder crack

Seventeen years of winged carcasses
now sprinkled in the turn lane
of a car I only just learned to drive.
Shining like shattered glass waiting
to cut the next branch and lay in to the future