Anna Maria Hong

Termite

​T is for tabloid and all the time in the world,

of infinite delight. The Queen is

resplendent in her distension,

the next iteration. The Queen’s abdomen

seconds, 30,000 eggs per diem. Workers

continuously feed her, climbing the tower
                                                                               
to refresh the fungus garden,

child worker or soldier and rarely:         

industry. This is life centrifuged to terminal

chamber of public scrutiny, serve

​a tulle twist of time wound round the pole

​the tuning fork in the tenor of time,

her slick abdomen the color of tea, pulsing

is an open medium, ejecting every few

with their heavy misshapen heads

from chamber to light and threat

so that she may eat as she excretes each
     
a new Boy King. This is pleasure as

velocity: consume, fuck in the royal

your servant babies.                                                                          

---

Vulture

Better the fleshy crest of the Andean condor flapping like a torn ear,

                                                                                                    the corpse’s liquid slithering

                                                                                                    off the slickness. Better to look

 
grand from a distance. Inside the bestiary, a music box with a figurine lathed

like my mother’s

mother of a tragedy.

 
I don’t want to be another aborted

vector. Bring me his head
                                                                                                    on a blue-black platter.
 

                                                                                                    Life is an acid, feasting.
       
                                                                                                    ​My father’s corpse draped
 

like a legacy. I have burnt

his terror in

effigy.

--
Anna Maria Hong is the author of the novella H & G (Sidebrow Books), winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Clarissa Dalloway Prize, and Age of Glass, winner of Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Poetry Competition and the Poetry Society of America’s 2019 Norma Farber First Book Award. Her second poetry collection, Fablesque, won Tupelo Press’s Berkshire Prize and is forthcoming in early 2020.