Cicadas spend most of their lives underground before emerging as adults and mating. As a woman of childbearing age who has chosen not to become a mother, I find myself imagining an alternate reality in which I’d made a different decision, including reckoning that reality with the perils of the world, the possible emergencies, but also the joys that might come with that life.  

Whitney Waters holds an MFA from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She teaches writing at Western Carolina University and the Great Smokies Writing Program. Her poetry appears in One Art, The Shore, About Place Journal, and elsewhere. Whitney lives in Asheville, NC. 

I: @whitneywaters.poet