Fable
You were five hundred ants,
a black column winding across the kitchen wall,
pooling like ink in the trash can, if ink were
alive. You were looking for water, as you
(or some other five hundred ants)
always do in the heat, in September.
I was the woman
with the spray-bottle of Windex, I’m sorry,
in the middle of the night; five hundred
black specks, you, scattered in a panic;
subsided; died. The bottle leaked somehow,
bleach-smell strong on my hand for hours.
I was ruthless. I left all your dead bodies
stuck to the wall for the new scouts to find
Apollo
Their voices come back to us thin with static:
describing a pockmarked dustscape, they sound
almost disappointed, until they turn and see—
blue-marbled, strange, familiar—earth
rising over that dry horizon, the continents
all in their right places, clouds
over the Canaries, clear sky over Mexico,
the sea around the land around the sea.
It’s Christmas. The astronauts read Genesis
over the airwaves to the listening world,
And in the beginning God created the heavens
and the earth, tenderly, with a Texan twang,
as travelers, having crossed oceans, stand on a cliff
squinting into the distance, trying to see home.
Chloe Martinez is a poet and scholar of South Asian religions. She is the author of Corner Shrine (Backbone Press, 2020), which won the 2019 Backbone Press Chapbook Competition, and Ten Thousand Selves (The Word Works, forthcoming 2021). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Waxwing, Shenandoah, The Common and elsewhere. She teaches at Claremont McKenna College. See more at www.chloeAVmartinez.com.
Photo by p!o on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND