My Mother as Cicada
- Sep 2, 2020
- 3 min read
by Kiyoko Reidy
I dream my mother a cicada: her flesh gone hard, wings pulling from her back, veins spreading translucent rainbow across thin membrane like oil over water. She rises, a false locust, thick-bodied and screaming, red eyes blank.
Her scream, or song, a series of ribs buckling: the tymbal, crashing in on itself and refilling, the empty chamber of her new body echoing like drums in a cave. The crash and refill so fast the clicking rises to a steady hum, loud enough to ruin a good ear.
In the dream, she crouches in the living room of my grandparent’s house, spindly legs braced against the furniture, wings fluttering the overhead lights, stunted antennae waving blindly. The room is not how I remember it—but it’s how I have seen it in pictures: my mother as a child, positioned seriously in a miniature rocking chair, bruised knees pulled tightly together, oversized glasses catching the light. One of the cicada’s legs twitches against the same tiny chair. The sound of her singing slams around inside my sleep.
I have dreamed her this way for nearly eight years: huge bug hard-bodied and too loud, crammed into the shrunken parameters of my grandparent’s house.
Eight years ago was a summer of millions: the trees thick with cicadas, branches weighted, sagging. The cicada nymphs spent seventeen years sucking at plant roots—pulling xylem, amber honey water, into their rounded bodies. Then, the seventeenth-time spring’s sweetness touched their mouths—the signal to break ground and shed their hunched forms for a new hue: metal-green and glistening.
Eight years ago was the summer my mom sat across from me in a restaurant booth, stared into her salad and cried, salting the limp lettuce. She told me the way her father had hurt her. She was taught to lay silent and halved and breathe slowly and after, to try to forget.
I left the restaurant with this new knowledge, the two of us the same mother and daughter but now different: our old skins left behind, expressions frozen, unmoving and brittle in the booth. The day’s relentless heat made fuller still, chorused with cicada song.
For eight years I have dreamed her as cicada to give voice to her body, the sleeping mind’s attempt to allow her sound, song, scream. The ribs caving, the echo’s hollow pool. If she must bear this impossible weight, I want the collapse to be loud and haunting; I want to know her body will refill, will reclaim its shape.
Cicadas die unapologetically, bodies like big bullets scattered haphazardly in the streets. Sometimes they pile at the base of trees, a heap of glimmer and death. But only after they have laid eggs: little pellets tucked in the grooves of branches, prepared to fall to the dirt, burrow, and wait. Their cycle, thirteen or seventeen years—always prime—designed to outwit predators with their patience, their meticulous understanding of time. I imagine them beneath me always: tunneling, pulling sweetness from woody roots, molting as they grow, flourishing in the earth’s warm darkness.
Kiyoko Reidy is a MFA candidate in poetry at Vanderbilt University, where she currently serves as the Editor in Chief for the Nashville Review. She loves baking, hiking, and attempting to keep houseplants alive. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Chestnut Review, Red Rock Literary Review, Driftwood Press, Berkeley Poetry Review, America’s Best Emerging Poets, and elsewhere.
