By Lucas Cardona

Featured Art: Tongue amulet in the form of a cicada (hanchan) by Unknown

My limp body lulls through the hot, humid days
like a lukewarm dog’s tongue hanging off the edge
of time, begging for disaster, for that rotten stench
of nostalgia to drift away & be buried in the brain’s
contemporary fiascoes. Night after night,
caught gaping out the window in the same chilled,
sterile room. Only the shadows of bats flitter into
view, and the dark, lush limbs of American elm trees
groping toward evidence of further tangibility
with a desperation akin to worship. Something in me
must cherish the sound of cicadas feeding off each other
in their suburban, summertime mania, like the soulless,
asinine chorus of a fraternity chant. The girl at the
7-Eleven in the purple hijab restocks the Cheetos
and the world goes on devouring itself for no other reason
than something must be devoured if we are to continue
loving one another in this crudely selective fashion.
It’s terrible but it’s true, all heartache inevitably
resolves in that surreptitious method pain can only
accomplish with the brain’s private blessing.
I know now what I did, I did to destroy you.
I know, too, that I’m the one who’s destroyed.
But somehow that still feels like forgiveness.

Lucas Cardona is a poet and fiction writer from Lake County, IL.