Ant
Dustin King
Mother, mother, maker of my world,
did her part killing hundreds, thousands,
crushing them between two fingers.
The equivalent weight of a family of four
my father once calculated on a napkin.
Meet the colony! The blasted, the goddamned,
the forsaken, the winged major and semi-major.
The claustral and semi-claustral. The soldier, drone
and workers (essential, nonessential). The unmated,
the male sex slave, the occasional solitary drifter.
Homebodies and escape artists. Engineers, theologians,
talent scouts and their targets, the Queens and Future Queens.
We found armies touching antennae in the kitchen
identifying whose exoskeleton to assault, to consume.
Hyperimperialist matriarchs. Temporal polytheistic cannibals.
I daydreamed myself staked to the ground and slathered in honey.
I left the sugary remnants of my cereal in the sink,
extended a finger and let one climb on.
Dustin King would always rather be sneaking a bottle of wine into a movie theater. When nothing good is playing, he teaches Spanish and exchanges dreams with loved ones in Richmond, Va. His poems pop up in New Letters, Pembroke Magazine, and Door is a Jar. He is a poetry reader for Sublunary Review. He had two chapbooks out in 2025: “Last Echo” from Bottlecap Press and "Courteous Gringo" from Seven Kitchens Press. His third, Sonetos con Grietas: Dispatch from Mexico City is forthcoming in 2026 from Shadow and Sax Press.