By: Emily Knott
Clusters of frog eggs
ring the creek shallows
like the black-eyed peas
my grandmother served
each new year,
placed beside creamed spinach
and an empty chair
where her dead son Kenny
would have folded his hands in prayer
for tradition, for another year
to witness squirming embryos
usher in summer
with a hundred new tree frogs
to press their bellies
against kitchen windows every night.
And maybe Kenny
could have recognized
their loveliness, how their
pale, round skin was a delicacy. He could
have warned me
of crushing entire ecosystems
between rough-edged fingernails
or raising sandstorms in shallows
with callused bare feet.
But in truth, I didn’t realize fragility,
how anything could slip,
until Kenny gave out
years too soon. Quietude
in a hospital bed, in evenings
on the roof of a half-built house
decades before I was born—
memories I’m afraid to ask for,
because they could collapse like tadpoles
pushed beneath currents,
carried so far away.
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Bio: Emily Knott is a junior at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, where her creative writing teachers (affectionately?) refer to her as “Squirrel Baby.” When Squirrel Baby isn’t writing, she enjoys online window shopping, British television, and listening to strangers’ conversations (her best fiction comes from this kind of “research”). In the future, she hopes to earn an MFA in creative writing, become a published author, and, of course, drink lots and lots of coffee.
