When she was young my sister would turn herself into a locust.
Sometimes she’d do it at neighborhood parties, to impress boys,
or Dad’s friends, or one of our many guests. We were jealous of her,
for being so beautiful, as a girl or as a locust, and for never
having to do chores. Our mother let her spend all day eating:
leaves we gathered from the gardens that we could only enter
veiled, so as not to be seen by our neighbors, the tenderest plants
we plucked from soil that had never known the wound of the plow.
How could so much richness live in the scales of her wings,
in the segments of her abdomen? Once I went into her room,
without permission; I thought she was crying, but instead I
found her in bed, no larger than my index and middle fingers
put together. She was making the sound the locusts make
in the summer, when they begin to die. She had come
into her body, at last, like the rest of us. The next day
she was a girl again, sullen, and would not speak.
At dinner she shunned our offerings, and that night
through the open window I saw her, with her hair uncombed
in the darkness of the garden, unveiled, writhing in the dirt,
as though she could molt away her newfound skin.

© 2025 Kailee Pedersen