- 64 -

Cicada Summers
Ayla Walter

One of  my superpowers is that I am completely unafraid 
of  bees; buzzing right up to my neck cause I’m wearing a 
flower print shirt or dripping some half-melted strawberry 
slushy all over my hands. A friend once told me I could 
probably eat poison ivy without issue. Hate the heat but love 
the bugs summer, on the it’s been too long since I climbed a 
tree team, I miss the burrs in my hair girl—Where can I find 
someone who belongs to the woods as much as I do?

I guess this is what I get for settling in a city I love.

But the forest is here too, you know, just sublimated, just 
subtlety growing in behind our ears. Find a magician on 
the street corner to pull it out into view: shocking, bald-
faced. And the cicadas will tell you for free. Look, just ask 
them: where they cling screaming to your sixth floor window 
screen.

The coyotes have moved in, downstairs. Invite them over, 
won’t you?

For dinner, notice the dandelions punching through 
concrete. The crab grass that won’t give it up, no matter how 
much gravel how much acrid asphalt the ants keep coming 
back. There are lives adapted specifically to inhabit the 
habitat of  humanity. 

We are all biomes here.

And if  we were afraid of  animals in proportion to how likely 
they are to kill us everyone in the world would be terrified of  
mosquitos. But instead we kill sharks. Instead we hunted our 
fellow hunters, the wolves, into obscurity.

Or fed them, into dogs.