[Poetry | Issue 13]

Piper Rasmussen

Ant Devolution

‍ "Thus the general theme of ant evolution is from small groups of structurally similar, very versatile females to large groups of structurally dissimilar, highly specialized, interdependent females."

Ants by M. V. Brian, 1977

Eager, childlike, I was dropped on the street outside the unfamiliar house, yellow plaster,

"The first few steps towards social life are

sweating and swimming in a modest dress, gone svelte with strange food and gastric parasites of late.

obscure."

The portal creaked and locked behind me but the view ahead! A diluvian dark tunnel of cool shade in August, a deep trellis,

"The sting is a simple, pointed object

grapevines from door to gate. I dreamed beneath and tried to pet the guard-dog 'til my host-

without barbs (such as occur in the honeybee)…"

mother, titled tante, stepped out of the dark with arms flung wide, grand and nun-like, bustling

"The forelegs, besides having a comb, are used for holding food

down her drive and toward my chaste cell,

and are placed round the head of a larva

where I would stay a whole year – wasn't I pretty,

when it is being given liquid."

a nice girl, not like her daughter Diana,

Dee-ah-na, who left her mother and Moldova. I would stay, yes?

"…a stage of evolution is reached which has been called claustral; in this

The program had arranged it. But of course. She held her hand out

the queen seals herself in a hole

for the rent, then showed me through a room of photographs, compared

and produces the first brood from

my boyfriend's distance in the States to that of heaven, which

her own body reserves entirely."

her husband (bless his memory) now called home.

In the mornings, grechka and jam from the beci, a cooling dark of jars beneath the house. I climbed a tree

"If deprived of prey it can make some growth,

to pick her ripened apricots and pears, to make into kompot

so presumably it has a body source of food,

until one day I brought home strangers' fruit from some new grocery.

perhaps its thoracic wing muscles."

Betrayed, gone somewhere else – her smiles and gifts of fruit were history.

That day my tante felt her birthday and its party and its photos

‍‍ "An important stage of evolution occurred, it is suggested

coming on, and soon restricted all her meals to oats and salt

when the female lived long enough to control

bemoaning her gut pain, and rising weight! despite all that she'd done. To balance out, she baked and gifted cakes, shared

the behavior of the first young adults, prevent their

them with her neighbors, all politeness, sucked on sugar cubes, ‍ ‍e escaping, finding males and founding new groups."

'til she called the village ambulance one night, a banging on the door to be explained: her heart was breaking,

“[The sting] is tough and quite flexible, not brittle

I was so ungrateful! All too great a burden, “all my fault

and can be gradually pushed through the skin of birds and mammals

I could shatter windows with my sharpened stare.

‍ ‍ provided the ant can get a firm grip”

How lucky that these young men arrived so fast!” They measured her heart rate, and sighed, and told her to go back to sleep. But as they left, I asked as best I could, if they could maybe look at my own chest,

"After the usual number of moults and metamorphoses,

where I had been concealing a red rash and failing to resist the urge to scratch.

Gamely but suspicious of my half-mimed, lifted hem, a paramedic gestured I could show the reddened bites. A scoff: furnici. He sketched on an old envelope's reverse, showed me the cause: an ant, which must have fallen in my shirt

small, relatively simple, wingless females mature."

and gotten trapped. He advised to rub my skin with cream, and I had to let the nice man go. Soon I called a colleague to find somewhere else to live. And so my romance, wrought of trellises and drooping vines and holy hopes which lingered in my chest cleared up. And I went marching on.