All the DC Area Dogs
with the dumb luck to be alive
when the seventeen year gravy train
of a billion billion cicadas of Brood X arrive
The House Dogs and Senate Dogs
The Street Dogs, Mad Dogs, and Lap Dogs
Dogs of the Homeless
and Dogs in the Congress
Nearly every Dog growing fat
on the walking clicking droning
flying junk food popping
out of the ground
But beware, Dogs:
cicadas have a sense of purpose
They aim to get on up to the tippy top
of local trees and make love not war
among walnuts and beechnuts and acorns
Cicada haters say Brood X shall not replace us!
We are the soil’s true sons and daughters
But the biological truth is
the last cicada does
what the first cicada did
long before the Dog Days
That is,
they indulge in sex
to preserve the race
because the world is
a nexus of scatology
and genetics.
Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in Canada. Recent poetry and prose appears/is appearing in New Reader Magazine, Every Day Fiction, Unlikely Stories, Bluepepper, 365 Tomorrows, Dissident Voice, Jewish Literary Journal, The Journal of Expressive Writing, Boog City, Chiron Review, New Verse News, and Ginosko Review.