Leanne Averbach - changing channels

This summer is a mild racket. Like legions
of crickets rubbing statistics from their tiny wings

Twenty-four-hour news seeps through mesh
into oversweet air, wanting not to disturb

our scrim of little miseries. There’s
your lover waiting for you to think more of him.

He is your Penelope. He can pierce the airborne
world, fill the empty bow. There’s the list:

case of beer, fishing pole, drowning
lake, closed since the fish stopped

but you’d forgotten, got the pole. Cricket’s chirp is
generated by raising a forewing, rubbing it against

the staggering calm. This stridulating sound is also
called brain quiet. Here on the western front.