One summer day
I took a kettle of steaming water and flooded an anthill, watched as balled black bodies
floated down my brewed Nile and dried in the sand looking sugared, cinnamon-crusted.
I should have baked them into cookies and become famous for indecipherable
irresistible taste, a certain je ne sais quoi. Or thought to serve them poached. This
annihilation was not annihilation; the ants did not suffer and were turned into sugar beads
and their floating was serene. I didn’t know there’d be few
survivors; I expected in insects stamina a backbone obfuscates,
keeping vertebrates upright and vulnerable, subject to arrogance, breakage,
ravages, paralysis, the ideal immobility of food, facilitating admonishments to eat
until bones are picked clean, not only piranhas eating their instinct, but families
in public: Red Lobster, Bill Knapps, Kentucky Fried, countless rib joints, clean
as ivory; meals conclude with skeletons. I admire teeth, the cutting
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