THUGWISE CAT

Ants
By Judith Huang
The first thing you notice about this place is the ants. Ants on the walls. Ants on the floor.
Ants on the ceiling, between the crack between the lights. Ants in the kitchen, ants in the
living room, ants in the bedroom. Ants on the flowers you pick. Ants on the cup you put
down. Ants on the soles of your slippers. Ants, reddish brown, tiny as a fullstop with
tinier feelers. Ants, in a line, bringing reinforcements. Ants. Ants. Ants. Ants. The everpresent
soldiers of rot, of decay, of furor, of the ever-looming ever-present near-ubiquity
of death.
The death of an evening, the death of a week, the death of a year of Mondays through
Sundays. The death of you, the death of me, the death of the forest, the death of the city.
Ants, hailing the fact that everything’s rotting, quickly so quickly, in the fulsome decay
of the tropical sun.
Bury your grandma, and within a minute she’s a feast, of her eyes, her ears, her nose, her
hair. Ants at her neck, ants at her throat, ants on her tongue, ants in her vagina, ants
knocking at the unlockable door of her teeth.
Ants move in and build a nest. They knock down and they build up. They are building
museums one day, and catacombs the next. They are building MRT lines, they are
building library skyscrapers, they are building roads that lead nowhere and everywhere at
once. They are building shopping mall after shopping mall after shopping mall. They are
building hipster coffee shops, they are building sky gardens, they are building infinity
pools, they are building simulated high-tech break-neck metropolises, they are building
luxury villas for the billionaires of the world to unite in the carefully constructed tax
havens of the cove. Nothing stays, not the condos, not the semi-Ds, not the bungalows,
not the HDBs, everything is one fecund, rotting, shifting, collapsing thing.
Ants, everywhere ants, they are knocking down schools, they are tunneling through
libraries, they are demolishing skyscrapers to make room for even higher towers of glass
bridged by bridges of glass, they are unearthing your ancestors to build high-rises on the
wounded exhumed lands of the dead. Oh restless land, heaving with the absolute biomass
of ants, building your carefully commissioned babies new cribs in the sky, building a sky
high fantasy eye to eye your sky wheeling by.
Ants, putting together the labels on museums, the programs for concert pianists, legato in
this era and staccato the next, determining which species of trees we will grow on the
sides of the roads in robust and cacophonous harmony.
Ants - laboring to the rhythm of the silent obese queen, issuing orders through pneumatic
pipelines. Ants on my bed, feeding the gifted with royal jelly, keeping the drones in their
amniotic sacs even as poets emerge in full chorus, on cue, in your third generation.
Ah, ants, you have crawled over my crevices, you have exhumed my graves, you have
stalked up my banana ghosts, wafting like frangipani hosts in the middle of a wet petal.
Ah, ants, what have
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