Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine #16

Cricket’s Leg Broken punctuation, this elongated comma, stiff parentheses with no partner to close the deal.

Headless arrow, it points to a day I can’t recall, but I was outdoors or this tiny limb would not rest on a page I don’t recall turning. It was warmer than this day whose draperies of rain wants to slow into ice. Each summer a cricket gets in the house, camps under some piece of furniture too solid for my back, then grates forth a song whose notes are insomnia and the grave.

I forget the name of the pond where we were fishing when Billy Dale pinched a cricket behind the head and slid the book between carapace and soft body.

“That’ll make your skin crawl.” He held the head to my finger so I could feel the little mandibles work against my flesh.

I’ve never heard of anyone gnawed to death by crickets, but I developed an interest in artificial lures the next time we stopped to buy bait.

Like a road aiming beyond the map’s boundaries, that non-kicking leg always points backward, no matter that our focus is always forward.

Ahead, there will always be disaster—potholes, cars overheating, a wallet’s absence. There will always be the grinding you hear when dark gauzes our vision and all we see turns strange.