fall screams a funeral song in and out of my nostrils as leaves play gravedigger to brood ix’s cicada hums: time nurtures feelings for you like nymphs feeding off woven roots of hardwood trees. but when brood x reemerges from black soil to strip back bark and line limbs with eggs let's leave outlines of our burrowed memories in labyrinths of mud trenches and tiny holes. may those sentiments become the long-swallowed prey of barred owls, consumed whole and freed as piecemeal skeletons in pellet coffins fated to sink beneath grass blades after rain.