Jack Apollo Hartley

social creatures or on ant-bridges

it’s about having a place. about becoming
your own movement. your sister is an abutment,
and your sister is a railing, and your sister

and the next time you are a girder. loadbearing.
without you, your sister would fall. and so would your
sister and your sister and

and what if one of them, when she feels a step
on her thorax, grows tearducts? and what if your sisters
in their marching, their following of a common scent,

feel like one being, which is at once stretched flat across
the landscape and also dipping into the hill and filling it, which
is at once being birthed and feeding itself and dying and

holding an ant-hewn hand under herself for support, ant-girders
supporting how they can, and she cries ant-tears that crawl
down ant-cheeks? what of being part of a larger whole?

it’s about being a place. being an ant-tear. being the cheek
it wets. being the girder it rusts, and rusting, and being caught
by your sister and your sister and

AUTOTHYSIS

ALSO KNOWN AS ALTRUISTIC EXPLOSION, THIS IS A SUICIDAL ACT OBSERVED IN CERTAIN SPECIES OF ANT AND TERMITE INVOLVING THE
RUPTURE OF GLANDS OR INTERNAL ORGANS AT THE EXPENSE OF THE INDIVIDUAL, BUT THE BETTERMENT OF THE COLONY.

THIS BLOOD IS ROTTEN. RUNS THICK LIKE TAR. COAGULATES. SAME WAY FRUIT PULP DOES
DECAYING. CLUMPS, SICK SLICK OIL-BLACK OUT THE VEINS, UNDER GUMS. EVERYONE LEAVES
YOUTH-SOFT. MY MOTHER’S // MOTHER // GRANDMOTHER // MORE, THEY FLEW OUT ON
BRITTLE WINGS. TO BUILD TINY COLONIES. TO BE MONARCH. I WILL TELL YOU NOW. THIS
BLOOD IS NOT ROYAL. I WILL TELL YOU NOW—THIS ONE’S A SECRET. WE WERE NEVER SOCIAL
CREATURES. AND THIS BLOOD LASTS LONG. I’M SORRY FOR THAT. I’M NO TERMITE QUEEN, I
PROMISE. I’LL BURST. THIS BLOOD, I’LL LET IT QUENCH DRY EARTH.

Jack Apollo Hartley (@jackpollyharts) loves bugs. His work can be found elsewhere in places like warning lines, Kissing Dynamite, and perhappened, and he is the editor of HELL IS REAL (2022), which can now be purchased HERE