Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: When the poetry team accepted this poem by Kimberly Reyes and learned that it’s in a book due out this month (see the writer’s statement below), we were glad to feature it on our website, to take advantage of the timing. With themes of natural interdependence and the physicality of intimacy, the poem creates a soundscape featuring cicadas—another element of good timing, as those insects emerge in the eastern US as part of Brood XIV.

Listen to Reyes read the poem:

A Heartbeat in a Cemetery in Tennessee

It’s been over a year (I think)             I’m here
for a writers’ conference &
one of the teachers reminded me how trees talk
to each other underground.                 I think of their taproots
braiding the earth into place as a local man enters me &
I get that much needed hit, the rush
of forgetting why cemeteries have become rare places of comfort.

The sassafras branches converge as lattice for the moon
that’s climbing through leaves to laugh
at the awkward humping        & out-of-rhythm sighing
happening between the headstones. But the intoxicating madness
of cicadas,
who are also out, banging their backs against trees in a guttural plea
for sensation
/ annihilation, drowns out the sounds of our incongruence.

We are not planting roots tonight,       just laying the peat.

Now I remember it’s only been six months,               ’cause God plants
selective amnesia & that’s how memory is supposed to work
without the throughline of afterglow,             as all those

muddy faces rush back from the soil.

Writer’s Statement

This poem is part of a larger poem—which is my latest manuscript, Bloodletting. As I was putting this collection together I realized that every individual poem was more like a stanza in a larger project because of how the poems talked to each other through time and space. This poem/stanza was an unearthed memory I had when listening to cicadas in my backyard on a typically muggy summer night in Nebraska. That summer promised a “super swarm” of cicadas in the Midwest, but the broods must have (somewhat wisely) chosen not to “come out” in Lincoln, as the insect incursion never materialized.

I remembered the similarly thick summer air in Tennessee, how sparkling the skies were on a particular night, and how many other things didn’t materialize. I thought of the cicadas who, like the poem’s protagonist, were smart enough to not do the expected—defying clocks and timelines—waiting for habitable soil.

Kimberly Reyes is a poet, essayist, teacher, pop culture critic, and visual culture scholar. She is the author of three poetry books, including the recently released collection Bloodletting (Omnidawn, 2025). Her work has appeared widely in outlets including The Atlantic, The Associated Press, Entertainment Weekly, The Village Voice, ESPN The Magazine, The Poetry Review, and American Poets Magazine.