Anna Maria Hong
Termite
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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.
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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.