And the Grasshoppers Flick All Their Wild Wings

By Jessica Dionne

Amid blue flowers, I cried for what I never had.

                                                                                                            A verdant violence.

All of my worries are two-handed and humming.

                        The chambers of their abdomen         

                                                                                                            a counting of loss.

The milk-white hands of your mother

                        we’ll never pass down. I once called desire

                                                                                                            the wrong title

named it need, forgot the difference

                        and decided the distance was a small bee

                                                                                                            lost in smoke.

There are raptures that won’t come for you

                        And raptures that will. A one-winged

                                                                                                            caelifera

on a path of unconcerned spirals.

            Out by the lamppost, screaming bright circles—        

                                                                                                            an infestation.

Each one an anxiety, escaped from the throat.

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Jessica Dionne is a PhD student at GSU and the production editor of New South. Her chapbook Second-Hand Love Stories is forthcoming from Fjords Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Moth (IE), Narrative, Forth River, Meridian, SWWIM, Rust + Moth, Banshee (IE), and Mascara Literary Review (AU).