Overwhelmed with an unexpected hunger
I leave my sandwich on the counter,
& step into mother’s bedroom. I lean over her,
pinch one of her nipples with my thumb & forefinger.
The moles on her breast swirl around her nipple
like black ants, as if her nipple were a pebble
I’d forced into the mouth of an anthill.
An ant bites my thumb,

& just thinking of abuela’s home remedies,
a glass of milk, a mint leaf torn in half under the tongue,
begins to numb the throbbing of my thumb.
But mother, each time I ran into the house crying
about a bite mark, led me back to the anthill,
& instructed me to crush ants against the bite mark
until the burning subsided.

How can she believe she isn’t beautiful
when I have her cheek bones, her temperament?
I let go of her dark nipple, enter the kitchen for milk.
Ants crawl across the counter: their persistence
a current crackling along their frayed length
that unwinds like telegraph wire across the floor,
out the door, & before reaching

the blue-corn mesquite in our backyard it unravels
into two cords, each hitched to an anthill.
I raise my foot to level them with swift kicks like a boy,
like a good boy, but I think of mother. Why
did it please me when her face turned into a wound
on my sixteenth birthday? On a porch,
dusk knotting into stars

above the trees, I told her the truth, I’m gay.
Her gaze withered the moles on my skin
like ants under a magnifying glass. There was nothing,
nada, I could do but offer word after word.
Perhaps ants dismantled the flesh of a woman
buried in a nearby cemetery, hauled crumbs
of her fatty tissue through cracks in her coffin,
across manicured lawns,

& built these anthills before me so a group of boys,
stumbling upon them, could believe a woman,
her breasts speckled with moles, waited for her lover
in the shade of a mesquite. O those boys,
the apprehension on their faces crumbling like paper,
pinned to the ground by lust! I wedge my body
between the anthills, & thousands

of slight legs sweep across my chest, & shoulders
as if the hairs on my torso had become sentient & mobile.
I press my face against an anthill & weep.