The Junebugs — Blackbird Archive

← v21n3, Spring 2023

Hey boy come here—quick,

so he dropped his rake and

ran to the yard by the house

where probably five hundred

junebugs like a pile of emeralds

and rubies glistened crawling

over each other under each other

in the grass. By god look at them

fornicating, he said and his son

said Hold on, I got an idea, and ran

to the house for the bundle of

twine and gunpowder he had tied

together into a bomb for such

a purpose and blew an equally

glittering hole into the yard

a foot into the earth and the punch

his father landed reverberated

in his skull for the rest of his life

and when the assassin fired

it was the last thing he saw—

junebugs everywhere crawling

glistening in the tall summer grass.

childhood violence history

Steve Scafidi

Steve Scafidi is the author of Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer (Louisiana State University Press, 2001), For Love of Common Words (Louisiana State University, 2006), The Cabinetmaker’s Window (Louisiana State University, 2014), To the Bramble and the Briar (University of Arkansas Press, 2014) and a chapbook, Songs for the Carry-On (Q Avenue Press, 2013). He has won the Larry Levis Reading Prize, the James Boatwright Prize, and the Miller Williams Prize. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and he has taught at several universities including, most recently, in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.