Rumination

Michelle Bonczek EVORY

Two hundred ants crowd a sidewalk.  The anthill is crawling  with wants. Everyone who looks down and sees this thinks
All thoughts carry tiny stones and sometimes
even other thoughts. Some thoughts even eat other thoughts,

the girl with the very, very heavy voice says. 
She was looking at the ground, picking at her eyelashes wishing 
to make herself lighter when the man carrying an umbrella 
walked by humming a song about rain. But the girl

with the heavy, heavy voice did not notice. She was too busy
looking at the ants thinking No one wants to be carried on another 
back like an afterthought. The man with the umbrella
wishes he were a painting of a man with an umbrella, thankful

he is not the person who dropped the ice cream cone dripping sticky
green between cracks of concrete, between cracks of cone. 
Noise rises from the anthill where the girl’s voice is being taken 
to the queen. It takes all of the ants. The girl’s voice is very, very heavy. 

Michelle Bonczek Evory is the author most recently of The Ghosts of Lost Animals, winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize (Gunpower P), and a textbook on craft Naming the Unnamable: An Approach to Poetry for New Generations (Open SUNY Textbooks). Her poetry has been featured in the Best New Poets Anthology and in many journals and magazines, including Crazyhorse, cream city review, Green Mountains Review, Orion Magazine, The Progressive, Wasafiri: The Magazine of International Contemporary Writing, and Water~Stone Review. She and her husband poet Rob Evory have been awarded Artist Residencies at Gettysburg National Military Park and at UNESCO World Heritage Site SERDE in Lativa. She holds a PhD from Western Michigan University, an MFA from Eastern Washington University, and an MA from SUNY Brockport, and mentors poets at The Poet’s Billow.