There are no seeds in this puckleberry no worms in this ant hole. Have you ever heard their anthem? Over and over from hog to tide: “remember what you are doing here, you’re keeping yourself alive.” Birds can hear the wind over the mountaintops and a few of your thoughts got left on my pillowcase last night. If you stand on that mat long enough you’ll shrink into what will appear to be nothingness. There’s a whole microscopic colony down there. At least, I think they’re still there.

In the nest lies a bird with a thought in a brain. Sometimes I look into her eyes and I worry, I worry she will try too hard to find the answers that no one can give her. But then again, what do I know of a thought in a brain of a bird. I know it is real and sometimes seems almost omniscient. It is loop-de-loop powerful, unclouded by coco-pop pop and crunching cheerios, sometimes arcing so high it must be spring-loaded beyond belief. I have to think, if birds await the judgment day they do so in a manner so bold so brash I cannot hope to compete. To covet thy neighbor’s mate is expected and to shove thy neighbor’s unborn child out of his home when thy neighbor is not looking is morning routine. Shoving thy own babe to his sticky death is a risk that sometimes must be taken. I am sorry unborn child, thinks a brain of a bird in the nest, I cannot be sure you are mine. 

We stared at each other from across the room
Pretending not to know the proximity of our blood vessels, carpal bones, neurotransmitters
Fueled by oxygen pulled from the same sample
Our feigned inscience effective, until

I felt a tap tap tap on my toe
I took my foot out of my shoe, my sock
Perforce wrinkled my nose at the ant methodically peeling off my purple nail polish

She had a message to deliver
I could see it in her antennae
She cleared her throat,
Began her dispatch:

“Come closer come closer
Closer still
I need to feel your breath under my jaw,
I need to know you are still here”

With knocks on my sternum I countered:
“Soon I will need you
We will all need you
When I can feel your breath no longer
I will need you to free the maggots in my marrow”

The ant’s features did not change as she trickled back across the room
To relay my message
To my oxygen partner

He appeared to have swallowed the prostate juice of a dog
As his tympanic structures gave in to vibration,
And then there was a gathering of intensity
Slightly left of right between his eyebrows

He said nothing to the ant
But instead slid forward across the tiles,
tipped towards my ear canal, gave a single hop
toppled onto my eardrum, and whispered
“We have very little evidence
that steroids make their own invertebrates”

I grinned from ear to ear
Swept up the shop
Upturned the chairs
And lost myself to the wriggling inside my bones

I once
Made the mistake
Of claiming ownership over a can
Of Canada Dry. 

“My name is WESLEY
And I answer to no one”
He declared with an air debonair.
Glaring at my outstretched digits
He verged on indignant
But to be indignant
Would imply that he cared. 

I caught him wearing a cape
Two Thursdays ago.
I pushed my lips outward
With intention of asking
“Where did you find such a ridiculous pattern”
But just as I contracted my muscles
He speared me with a haughty glance
And executed an indefectible heel spin
Before promenading away with a dignified totter. 

I did manage to ambush him with a question
Once.
I asked him which cricket team
Would receive his support come springtime.
And now
My forearms look like hay season.

He’s gone, now
Something about the coast of Monterey.
Last night he was singing under his breath about San Francisco and flowers in your hair
This morning no one was there to swallow his vitamins.

She stood up with a look of kamikaze crazy in her eyeballs and bellowed to her generation SLATHER ME IN YOUR SUBCUTANEOUS BELLY FAT. There is a place for me in this world I have no doubt but that place is not now. Send me back through the cladograms of your lignin textbooks, put me to rest in the Age of Fishes. Wherever I land I will breathe in, breathe in the oxygen and grow so big so terribly terribly big my hominid heart will not support my gigantism. And then one day, maybe tomorrow, you will find my fossils deep within the bedrock.

My coffee cup has been colonized by ants. The whole inside is a black swarming mass. They coat the walls and when I tip the cup they pour into my mouth. When I put the cup back down, those still inside form a solid shadow, undulating at the top. I am swallowing as I ponder this and they are forced to tumble down my esophagus.  A few get left behind in my mouth. In jousting them around with my tongue, one sticks to the tip and as I lick my lip he grabs onto my face, up over and into my left nostril. I sneeze but he is a swift and talented climber.
As he explores my cranium, his fellow Formicidae are not making out so well. They are in my stomach now, churning with my blueberry bagel and stomach acids.
A survivor bites the lining of my stomach. A single tear squeezes out of my eye and inside of it is Swift and Talented Climber. He rolls down my cheek and I position the coffee cup so it will catch him when he lands. He falls into the cup of ants, and they erupt into cheer without abandon. 

We follow silently, carefully, from a distance
As the anteaters toss and turn and trundle
On their way.
They follow the visible wafts of yellow, blue, purple
Eyeing the lingering scent of green with anxious anteater eyes.
They would not wish that discovery upon their greatest anteater enemy.

They reach a crevice, of sorts.
An octagonal well
In the lithic ground
And in they climb. 

We still follow, still silently, still carefully, from a distance
And as we descend
It becomes more than clear
Silence is of no concern. 

The anteaters stare upwards
At anteaters.
Lost anteater loved ones hanging from the ceiling
Like—not like twists of vines,
Not like ropes of mucus,
Not like medals. 

And in this anteater mortuary
The wafts of color proudly return home,
Trailing the living behind.
The cavernous walls irradiate with incandescence
As those who hang are illuminated from within.  

The living with loved ones of yellow are jubilant!
The blues ecstatic!
The purples smile anteater smiles through their tears.
They will sleep well tonight
Knowing their loved ones have found
An anteater nirvana, if you will. 

But the greens
They are finally learning
Their loved ones who now hang so gracelessly
Have found no solace in the after.
And they cannot follow, cannot rescue, can only stare
At the hanging green anteater bones.

For class tomorrow, we had to write in the style of someone unlike ourselves. I didn’t use anyone specific, just sort of an anti-Jana persona. I kind of can’t stand it. Here it is:

It’s a jungle out there. Sometimes the sun breaks through the canopy and reflects golden-green off of leaves and bird beaks and ants making their way along twigs. They keep time with their little legs. But the rest of the time, it’s a jungle out there and the jungle is a torrid bitch slip slop sucking you dry of all you’ve got until you’re so twisted and turned that you turn straight to the fucking wolves. Beg them to eat you alive with your puny voice that never sounded good on an answering machine, anyway. You stretch out your hands. What were you going to do with those fingers, anyway? Write love letters to the dead that deserted you so long so long so long ago you can’t even remember what their voice sounded like on an answering machine? Or maybe you were going to tap tap tap a few keys on the keyboard of your laptop that, for years, stood in for the Friday night dates you never had. After your hands come your arms, the very same arms that used to wrap around your lover after he informed you that, yes, you would be spending the entire day at Dolphin World. Did you leave him a voicemail, or will he assume you finally ran away from the shitty family you never defended? Send the wolves to them next, amIright? In my experience, next goes your torso. Your lean, smooth torso with just enough belly button hair to be filed under “gruesome.” Snap goes your spinal cord, steam go your innards. It’s all downhill from there. 

There are pine needles and pine trees and good God can you taste that?
It’s like someone marinated the spit of the Devil in a lamb stew
My mother made a lamb stew once. It tasted like
I’m sorry. That was the start of a lie. My mother has never made lamb.

My Father, on the other hand
No, no, my father has never made lamb. Or rather, not that I have tasted.
But I imagine, if he did, it would taste like sun and wind and a bicycle and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches made by strangers.

I have nothing else to say.
That was a real lie.  
I have so much to say  

The bunny hopped over the river and landed in a bush of azaleas but wait each individual azalea was in reality a portal but unfortunately for bunny he landed across two different azaleas and from his head to his stomach was ripped into an azalea tunnel towards Flahrs The Land Of Marzipan while from his kidneys to his tail whirled and sped into the azalea of oblivion, aka Old Spice Commercials On Repeat where it turned out Old Spice Guy was in dire need of a large colon and so bunny was not torn apart in vain but will forever live on in both your marzipan and your deodorant.