Carapace from Woven by Hazukashi Studios Kyoto

The Sound and the Fury



They came before language, a year after me, they came

back: seventeen-year cicadas. For weeks

they stared, red-eyed and vibrating, folded

under new leaves but driven in that heat



to mate and smash against glass.

They crawled up from under the ground,

mounted the trees, as if they remembered, leaving

their delicate shells to the gnarled bark.



When they’d let go, the rattling whir grinding higher

toward its impossible pitch, I’d come out of sleep as well, sweaty

and hard from dreamfucking a girl I was too scared to kiss.

I suffered valiantly, unrequited and polite

as the genteel poor, lonelier than a grown virgin. At night

I lay awake reading. Small voices cut the day like a saw.

Peter Ramos (Television Snow Blaize/Vox Books Used w/permission)

• Latin
• World
• afro
• electronica
• world music
• Kyoto