Inside the city limits, cicadas synchronize their metallic
rasping for what they believe might well be their one
true love who’s taken up residence an oak tree away.
Above the city, six precision-maneuvering Blue Angels
do acrobatic, aerial loop-da-loops, executing trademark
kiss & mock-strafing war game to frighten suburbanites
right down to their curled-up, orgasmic toes while the
century-old tree canopies shudder, shaken to the very core.
O city of failed & foiled dreams, throw out your welcome
mat for this all-out, show-stopping bombardment done
in the name of all the fallen heroes who’ve displayed
their all-American patriotic colors so immensely big-hearted.
Pray for our economic prosperity & global expansion of this
state’s farm implement industry. Everywhere one turns,
even reaching to the city’s raggedy hemlines, green-
capped men appear with their green-capped progeny in
tow, amazed as they are at the wistful sunset beyond
while surveying those nearly deserted baseball diamonds
with nothing more than the orchestration of combines &
corn harvest hymns on their minds. Blessings go out to
local farmers’ markets & vegetable stands, those worthy stops
marking the surrounding townships. In frenzied anticipation,
our populace has already scrubbed clean their grandfathers’
apple cider presses, relics that now are brimming over
with intoxicating eagerness for this coming autumn’s
windfall harvest. Our wayward daughters whisper
to younger siblings of recent sightings: papier-mâché
chainsaws, Styrofoam skeletons & witches’ masks
as well as an entire sordid line of Chinese-made tools
for TV-esque torture, all at the local mall. Could pilgrims,
plastic pumpkins, or boxed-up angel ornaments be waiting far
behind? But our mothers? Some turn away as others cry,
since crying’s never without some meritorious effect for
the young ones pulling hard at their mammas’ kitchen aprons.
Terry Savoie has had over four hundred poems published both here and abroad in the past four decades including in APR, Poetry, North American Review and The Iowa Review as well as recent or forthcoming issues of North Dakota Quarterly, Chiron Review, and Tar River Poetry among several others.
