by Sally Burnette

Barefoot on dark, damp grass.
Glassy insects catch ochre light in fragile wings
and scatter it across pale, young ankles.

Heat lightning spreads across
the sky like umbilical cords from
the quiet cloud mothers
to their disappearing children.

The women and the men sit
and listen to the sin-black crickets’ cry,
gently irritating as the sound
of a Coke can being dragged
across a picnic table.

Sally Burnette is originally from Oxford, North Carolina, and is currently a student at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida.  She has published one short story and two poems in the college’s literary magazine, the Eckerd Review.