by Josh Lefkowitz
I never think of our old shared home
without recalling a nighttime cricket,
lost and crying one balmy October evening
behind the walls of our basement apartment.
I remember continued frustration
as we struggled in vain to block out his chatter,
wishing all the while he were a moth,
dining on our sweaters in silence.
So many years since then
and memory is a rickety bridge of uncertainty,
telling me we found and squashed the intruder
rather than peacefully setting him free.
Yet it is hard for me to think of you
raising a knife-like sneaker over your head,
or being Lady Macbeth to my titular figure,
cosigning to murder for the sake of slumber.
How could I have known that ten years later
that insect would occupy a spot on my mental mantle,
along with the way your hair shined in the light,
or how you moisturized your elbows after a shower?
It’s funny, I guess – the way nostalgia greys
what I knew then to be black and white:
that in me was a chirping need to wander,
and it would never be silenced, until I did.
