Mosquito and Ant: Initial Correspondence to L

I. The Immortal Sisters

One has only daughters. 
One has a husband and lover. 
One has two ex-husbands. 
One has a rock band. 
One doesn't give a shit. 
One has a lover fourteen years younger. 
One is losing her lover. 
One is losing her lover to breast cancer. 
One writes on her coffee breaks at a bilingual program. 
One circles an island in her station wagon. 
One's first son just shot himself. 
One wants a donor egg. 
One can't speak to the others. 
One searches for the others as her source of immortality. 

II. Sea Anemones

At the café with pink marble tables 
I imagine you still asleep, a profile 
across the continent that darkens 
from this ocean to your own. 
Fish pierce the surface for gnats. 
Seals twist and turn. 
Perhaps you stayed up late 
rereading reptiles of the mind 
or moths of consciousness. Perhaps 
you wrote a letter. 

Me, I'm trying to write 
while a child repeatedly asks 
if bleeding hurts. You— 
your oldest daughter 
asks what her name means 
and perhaps you think of 
a day you asked your mother the same. 
My mother is dead 
and yours is living. 
You tell me: 
She still cooks for herself 
and when I visit she talks to me 
as if she's talking to herself. 
Or was that my mother? 
This correspondence blossoms like sea anemone 
ingesting the krill of our hearts. 

III. She

Shi in Japanese: four, poem, death 

In Chinese? 
In mosquito and ant script? 

(Yes in Chinese, yes.) 

IV. Scrawl

I want my letters to resemble 
tiny ants on a mission across this page. 
They spy a crumb of dark sugar 
on the far side of the embankment 
and their strategy is simple: 
the shortest distance between two points 
is tenacity not seduction. 
I want my letters to imitate 
mosquitoes as they loop 
around the earlobe with their noise: 

the impossible task of slapping one 
across its erratically slow travel. 
Those spider-like legs. The sheaths of wings. 
The body that transports disease. 
I wonder if a straight man can read such lines. 

I want my letters to resemble the smoke 
when the widower burned his young wife's poems 
so she might polish them in heaven. 
The smoke not unlike burnt toast or punk.