Post by Lizzy Burnam 🐞 - Takahē

Takahē

2y

Last poem of NaPoWriMo! The prompt was to write a palinode, in which the speaker abandons a prior position held within the poem.

Really proud of this one! Was a great month for writing but I’m ready for a break now lol.

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Exoskeletons In college I dated a carpenter ant. When we first met, we recognized each other immediately, like two thieves, by the smell of sawdust on our hands. He said he had a soft spot for the dead look in my eyes and the way I always acted bent out of shape and place, like a fat hunk of driftwood on a pebble beach. I considered falling in love with him but decided against it. Our dates were short, sterile, and systematic. Like clockwork, he would crawl inside my dorm up through a crack in the floorboards to tunnel through my body with his sharp mandible. Afterward, he'd thread the holes with the vines of a willow tree. "History favors the bold," he liked to say. "The foundation of excellence lies in self-control." He had a French name meaning "assault on the king" or something like that. I always read it as stigmata, like one of his great-greats did something so foul it reverberated through the family name for seven generations,

but I think he secretly suspected he descended from royalty-the kind of royalty that takes the throne not by birth, but by force. His style of stroking turned me straight to honeydew, the voids he left glowing sweetly green as he sucked the breath out of me and regurgitated it back into my mouth. "To your health," he'd say, and I'd fall asleep to the clicking of his antennae. He bragged of having mated with countless queens before me but I think they would've killed him? I won't pretend to know much about the reproductive rituals of ants. Just wasn't built for the colonial life, myself. We went off and on for a while until he left me for a monarch butterfly. I don't blame him. She was an emblem of joy, lively beyond question, fervid as a wildfire. Anyway, he texted me recently to say he was sorry for being cruel. I decided to love him then.

Didn't we both escape from that same tower of dirt? It took me years to learn how the soft-bodied keep their little bellies fed. And the more I think of it, the more it strikes me sensible that the most sensitive creatures in this rough-hewn world have the hardest exterior shells.

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