Read the poem provided below and write a 4-6 paragraph essay. The essay must include an opening paragraph and a thesis statement. You should be quoting the poem where it is needed to provide the evidence in each body paragraph, and you should be citing the poem’s line numbers in your essay. No work cited is required.
The poem
“Kaytlyn invites me to a party”
by Dessa Bayrock
I roll the word party around in my mouth
like an unripe rose hip. I take myself for a walk,
find a cicada* bunched up in what’s left of its skin.
It crawls out mint green, pale pink, and leaves
the shell of its own self behind, ghostly. Rose hips**, 5
too, I think are ghosts-_although I’m never sure
if rose hips are the thing that comes before
or after the rose. I know at some point, some
times, wasps crawl into them, maybe for food, or shelter,
or a party. A party. The last party I went to 10
was two springs ago, two crawlings of cicadas,
two swellings and burstings of blossoms. It feels dim,
now, the memory of it wrapped up in the buzz, the hum,
the voices crowded into Kaytlyn’s apartment
before it was painted pale pink, before the break-up 15
split it like a rose hip. Seeds must spill from something
like that, right? Something new must emerge?
I watch the cicada crawl out of itself, go nowhere,
harden up as quickly as it can in the bright air,
but me I am still soft. The petals that come 20
before the hardening. The cicada
still shivering like a nymph***
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