Ants

Ants

1

Like angry black hairs

the ants scatter everywhere

when I discover them

under the hem

of the water drum

2

They are like

runaway exclamation marks

on their side

their heads

the full stops

3

A year after the gulf war

I stayed with a friend in the states

who suffered a home invasion

of ants .

He sprayed , stamped , stomped

on them

till his house was clean .

That’s what Bush should have done

with Saddam he proclaimed

4

There are no ants in heaven

a priest explained to us at school .

Some how they got beneath the creator’s gaze

like cockroaches , rats and spiders .

They have no souls .

Kill with impunity

5

Smidgins of black , dashes.

a black din of limbs

an amokery of midnight slivers

through a crack in our world

they got in

*pic courtesy of pinterest

Hittites

You jerk

awake

black thoughts

scuttle across

the floorboards

of yr brain

little

armour-plated

Hittites,

the cockroaches

of yr mind

• photo by Hermes Rivera from Unsplash

Wrecks

 

Whenever my mother got in a state, she’d declare, “I feel like the wreck of the Hesperus, the Titanic and the Lusitania all rolled into one,” careful to keep things chronological. The old people they sure knew how to lay things on thick. But least they taught us the art of melodrama and not a little history.

 

* do you recall any sayings your parents or grandparents had?

The Cat with No Eyes

Was photographed

on a bus seat with sunglasses

smoking a cigarette,

on a pedestal wearing a tiny

camouflage boonie hat,

floating on a little pillow in a

wading pool with flowers

behind its ears,

& in ninety other poses —

and because it had no eyes

that cat from Abu Ghraib

they put pebbles in the sockets

of its mummified head

which looked out at the world

with a blank stare..

 

[ based on a New Yorker story on Sabrina Harriman: the woman

behind the camera at Abu Ghraib]