I’ll use every word
I ever learned
three times over
trying to make something
singularly beautiful
as certain circumstances
refracting and dispersing
light and water

name fifty shades of blue
in an attempt to
describe the shadow
across your eyes
twilit and troubled
in that city overcast
by tall buildings
and dying men

we are ants with
a pile of sand
and three weeks to live
trying to build
a cathedral

you argue that ants
aren't aiming for beauty
just tunnels and chambers
food storage
and a treasury of eggs

I look at the new overpass
just a curve of concrete
point a to point b
and if that were all
I’d be inclined to agree

but there is that span
of bridge, spiderweb
tensile and grace
singing songs of
orange light soaring
over a hundred thousand
cars like ants
in the morning rush

spun out of imagination
and a desire to match
the wisdom of biology
the beauty of wildness
the chance collision
of light and water
into glory risen high
in the face of time

Sossity Chiricuzio is a queer femme outlaw poet, a working class crip storyteller. What her friends parents often referred to as a bad influence, and possibly still do. A 2015 Lambda Fellow, she writes as activism, connection, and survival, and is found in places like Adrienne, NANO fiction, F(r)iction, and Lunch Ticket.