Joey Wańczyk's "Locust Song" has been paired with an exoskeletal insectoid garment from Thierry Mugler's 1997 Spring/Summer show "Les Insectes." Mugler's locust-inspired look features imaginative corsetry, a sheer gown evocative of gossamer wings, and an antennae headpiece that conceals the face, allowing the wearer to remain anonymous. By way of an "anonymous shroud of locusts," Wańczyk's elegiac "Locust Song" confronts a "scalded" earth and the dynamic silence of a "lyric found burned."
— Paul Cunningham, Editor
Locust Song
What has been sung about the world will smolder unnoticed, voiceless,
how evening strangles all birdsong with its ashen thread
or the embalming, anonymous shroud of locusts.
Erased by omission, lyric found burned, almost bodiless,
discarded in shallows of the secret, fragile riverbed.
What I fear: the world’s birds leaving unsung, voiceless,
ships passing through a new moon’s light, no longer fluoresced
in the radar of the ear. What appears as a thunderhead
upon the distant forecast: a mirrored mass of newborn locusts.
What vortex of breath, closing refrain that escapes its gauze dress
of noise, inhuman cry of tiny angels heralding the end,
the nests of bluest shells now rendered cold and voiceless.
In the shadow of the pit, fire etches in earth an absence:
slow violence of smoke drenching the world—clouded
grey haze—where even there can be no lone locust.
Out of the ash from deepest flames the lotus
can thus be planted, between what is said and left unsaid.
What has been sung of our world dies out voiceless,
scalded, as the grasshopper dawns its golden carapace of locust.
Joey Wańczyk is a poet from Indianapolis, Indiana, soon to be relocating to Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is a recent graduate of the M.F.A. program at the University of Oregon. He is the founder of Waltz, a new journal of poetry. His writing has appeared in Meridian, Shō Poetry Journal, & Change, and Pacifica Literary Review, among others.
IG: @jjooeeyyyyyyy
