13 cicadas on 14th street by Ryan Winegardner
This piece doesn't directly place itself in the pandemic, but I wrote it soon after leaving isolation at UVa for Covid-19 in the spring semester. It is full of symbols encrypting/representing the pain, nostalgia, and lacking that I feel defined my first year of college, a year dominated by the Covid-19 pandemic. It draws on references to other works, such as writing by Wallace Stevens, Arthur Rimbaud, JD Salinger, Joni Mitchell, Kobayashi Issa, the Old Testament, Greek Myth, and references to places in Charlottesville to create a quilted work about the nature of loneliness.
“13 cicadas on 14th street”
i.
thirteen cicadas
on a dying dogwood tree
scream into the night.
ii.
coyote stands under a lamplight on the corner
listening to the cicadas;
he has three bags and they’re all empty;
across the street — on the stoop
people listen to soapy music
and stare.
iii.
a bus rolls through to the beat of jazz
it stops — apostasy — and creaks past;
the air is warm. the guitar whispers;
two squirrels — hunched together
build their nest.
iv.
Raise High the roofbeam, carpenters!
Aries rises in the sky;
behind closed doors
the Head of the Chamber of Commerce
beats two lepers senseless.
v.
worms take the sidewalk in ecstasy
while water drowns the earth
the worms squirm and squirm and squirm
and in the end
they’re coaxed
to crushing sidewalks —
but at least they have their
ecstasy.
vi.
the shadow of the Parthenon
looms over the town;
a racoon roots trash in its umbra
while Minerva, Rockefeller,
and Jefferson
hunch around a coffee pot
talking about
tin-armor ideals,
million-dollar opera halls,
pomp and Parousia,
and somewhere, the racoon
scavenges his family’s breakfast.
vii.
two birds cry
across indigo gloom;
a light in the window goes on
and the song echoes
down the road.
viii.
the moon’s reflection splays
on a dirty roadside puddle;
between the moon and its image
buzzes a cloud of gnats in heat.
ix.
the moon and the sun are
yoked together by myriad rope —
an ox dying in the field
like Ganymede dancing
under Zeus’s throne;
seven geese in V formation
flying home;
eleven bombers en echelon
dropping their payload;
thirteen cicadas
hanging on a tree;
or,
the way one lover
looks at the other
while the world sleeps.
x.
the moon can’t catch the sun;
the clouds roll through the sky;
a flung beer bottle
rises, catches the starlight,
and shatters the silence of the night.
xi.
the rain falls green,
and smells like arrows
piercing flesh
xii.
coyote’s on the corner
under a lamplight
he looks left,
he looks right,
and…
xiii.
on the tree — thirteen husks
whisper of the past,
whisper to the future;
down the road, coyote
walks away.