A rare dual brood emergence of cicadas is happening this spring, and it will not happen for another 221 years, according to entomologists. These insects can create sounds that often hit 90-100 decibels, which is louder than a hair dryer.
“The Year of the Periodical Cicadas,” The National Institute of Food and Agriculture, United States Department of Agriculture, March 26, 2024
I
The first parties emerge
Like scouts, inspecting the land.
You hear a whir, a hiss, the sound
Of one winding a mechanical clock
Or a music box.
A small intrusion
Into the noises of mid-spring:
the chirping robins, yodeling cardinals,
hammering woodpeckers.
II
Alone, on its back
At the tip of the paw of
A curious cat.
It buzzes as it’s nudged,
As it’s sniffed, observed,
And flails as the inspector cat
Loses interest and
Saunters off.
III
On a morning walk,
Along a sidewalk splattered
With wounded mulberries,
Swollen blue-black, purple, red
Things, smashed into the
Concrete canvas like
Splotches of a Jackson Pollock painting.
The chants, incongruous, cacophonous,
Unsettling.
Raucous.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and billions of cicadas
Are one.
V
In an outburst,
Farther down the path,
A murmuring, an uproar,
Where the catalpa tree blossoms
Lie crushed on the concrete,
Battered by last night’s rainstorm,
And the steps of dogs and people.
VI
Like a headache
As you strain to ignore
Their incessant song
To hear your soft-spoken neighbor
Whisper the latest confidential matters.
VII
As a steady thrum
In the late afternoon heat,
The volume rising
With the humidity.
VIII
In the car, on a drive
Through town
To the grocery store
Or Walmart.
Windows open, you hear
Their buzzsaw song rising
As you near,
Then crescendo and fade,
Their sound distorted
By the Doppler effect.
IX
In the distance, it seems,
As you stroll mid-morning
On a cloudy day, their
Individual whirs and chirps now
Growing into synchronicity,
A uniformity, higher in pitch,
The band finally coming together but
It’s like the sound of aliens
Invading the peaceful town
In a 1950s sci-fi movie,
In black and white.
X
An intrusion.
An invasion.
An interruption.
An interregnum.
XI
As a triumph,
The trumpets of
The conquistador bugs.
XII
As invisible motorcycles,
Little Hell’s Angels
Rumbling through the Sturgis
Of your neighborhood.
XIII
As a familiarity,
A noise as common as
The stifling Missouri summer
Air it travels through, and
At sunset, a symphony that
Accompanies the distant hues
Of rainbow sherbet clouds,
Red and orange and green
Bruises on the sky.
Andrew Careaga is a former public relations and marketing executive who lives and writes from his home in Rolla, Missouri, USA. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Fan, Southwinds, Paragraph Planet, Red String, and Bulb Culture Collective. He has creative non-fiction scheduled for publication in July 2024 in Club Plum Literary Journal. He survived the Great Cicada Invasion of 2024.
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