Claire Zoghb
Cicada
(Inspired by the 17-year periodical cicada "invasion" of the U.S. East Coast in 2013 )
What if it were
this easy to leave:
Arch the dorsal thorax
and in one long breath
back out
of this exoskeleton
Unfurl orange-veined wings
Leave
the gold-brown husk
on someone's cracked sidewalk
for feral paws to bat
Follow the burning gaze
in your crimson eyes
Buzz upward
in search of swaying oaks
Disappear
into the applause of leaves.
Bio
Claire Zoghb's first collection, Small House Breathing, won the 2008 Quercus Review Poetry Series Annual Book Award. A chapbook, Dispatches from Everest, is forthcoming from Fomite Press. Her work has appeared in Connecticut Review, CALYX, Crab Creek Review, Mizna: Prose, Poetry and Art Exploring Arab America (The Lebanon Issue), and Natural Bridge, among others, online at Sukoon, Assisi Online Journal and Mezzo Cammin: An Online Journal of Formalist Poetry by Women, and in the anthologies Through A Child's Eyes: Poems and Stories About War and Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems. Twice a Pushcart nominee, Claire was the winner of the 2008 Dogwood annual poetry competition and one of the ten finalists in the 6th Annual Nazim Hikmet Poetry Festival (April, 2014). A graphic artist and book designer, she is Graphics Director at Long Wharf Theatre.