She’d nudged the locust free
from the angled crack. Her toe
tentative, waiting for the angry whirr
of wings and grinding liftoff. Nothing.

She waits and bends to pick it up, a too
lightness in her palm. Sees it’s hollowed out
the way she’s become: the two of them now
but her still like in the beginning: the hole so

big she’d thought only to fill it, to put her finger
in the dike if only to keep the rest of her from
rushing out : didn’t the little girl need a father?
Well, a family then, and so she’d stuffed the hole

even more than once to be exact but things filled
from need are not the same as wanting it. She
places the locust on a leaf, pretends there is
no hole, the two of them, angling into the wind.