📬 Want some Southern goodness in your inbox every Friday?
Get Scalawag's latest stories and a run down of what's happening across the South with our weekly newsletter.
chicharras
This is a time of skin.
A time of creeks dangerously low and chilled.
And packs of deer – a dozen or more – roaming fiercely.
We steal the evening's coat, ruffle and tweed on this first night of fall.
The grass is magnetic. A grind of chicharras sing.
The moon offers its sallow bowl.
If we make it to The Bang Bang Bar there will be surfer music.
Someone will insert punk bass notes meant to tear into the night
but things aren't that serious.
Girls in horn-rimmed glitter glasses take selfies under chandeliers.
The next band tunes their guitars. The drummer with his lucha libre mask,
his rolling sticks now wasp stings across the skins.
These nights, immortalized by syrup and honey,
are meant to smooth the end of days
and usher in rebirth.
We are not yet new but we know we are coming.