They drink, sing and roll around naked—

do the frog dance outside their Falu Röd

red painted summer cottages, eat a smorgasbord

of pickled herring with dill-seasoned new potatoes,

mountains of smoked and cured salmon—and

meatballs of course, all finished off with strawberry

shortcake and shots of schnapps.

Oh how I want to do the frog dance, jumping

around and making quacking noises. I’d dance

around the maypole with flowers in my hair,

roll naked in fields of wildflowers—

become a grasshopper burrowing into the center

of the soft dewed petals of a rose, like a human

child curled against its mother’s bounteous breasts.

I would breathe in the sweet scent of her skin.

I would leap from leaf to leaf in the hazed summer sun.

Barbara Southard is a member of the boards of The Long Island Poetry Collective and The Long Island Poetry and Literature Repository. She served as poet laureate of Suffolk County, L.I. (2019-2021).