Aubade with Fire Ants and Gasoline

Dad’s shed was a paint chipped menagerie: Jim Dandy grits,

            red jerrycans, hedge clippers, fishing poles. He used to pockmark

the earth, sprinkle grits grain by grain onto the fire ant mounds

that popped up in the backyard like roadside Motel 6s. Once

I asked Dad if the ants bit because they were hungry. Probably.

We’re bad hosts. If we don’t feed them they will go

            to the next yard for a meal. But this is just a story Dad spooled

me in like a blanket after a nightmare. Kids at school said otherwise,

that the ants died; their abdomens, so small, bursting open like corn kernels

 in a skillet when the dry grits expanded inside them during digestion. I learned

from this—from Dad—how to handle unpleasant truths. Years later,

the anxious hive that burrowed in my ears and stung my insides were secret

                        guests. Well-fed, they would leave soon, just like the very first ants,

            the first time, the grapefruit sunrise of stings on my fingers that made

Dad buy the first box of grits. An anthill the honeypot that snatched

my little boy hands as they played in its basin. Then the itching, bubbling

            scabs, stinging Ivy-Dry. By high school I learned that grits can’t kill ants,

                        that it’s an Old Wives’ tale. It made sense of the mornings Dad’s silhouette

grew against a window-staining fire. Those mornings Dad must have laid a blaze

 upon the grits, the ant hills—Gomorrah razed by the rays of the rising sun.

And one morning, after I had discovered how to deal with them, Dad found

            me framed in the shed doorway, gas saturating my hair, my canvas shoes.

                        In the fumes Dad’s red hair was real fire, his face the pink sun. When he ran

            to me, I cast the grits like bones to say I was about to kill the ants, empty can

clasped in one hand, cigarette lighter a secret tucked into my back pocket.

Lucas Jorgensen is the 2019 recipient of Florida State University's Sassaman Undergraduate Creative Writing Award. In the fall he will be continuing his studies at New York University as an MFA poetry candidate. His other work is forthcoming in Golden Walkman Magazine.