Raspberry, cream puff, blondie, I am eating my way home.
When you go away, you learn how other people are hungry.
I want to feast like other women do, travel more lightly,
but first I had to get sick, laid up with a belly
like a hill of boiling ants. Women, as hungry as me,
fed me wine whenever I stepped from my room,
fed medicine into the weeping mouths of my insect bites,
said, You’re alone? How lonely.
then fed my protests with fish.

Outside the window, I watched weaver ants
pin leaves into a skull-sized nest.
The colony is the body, with ants as the cells,
but rice-sized engines, and thrown wedding-high
to weld the boughs. How much home
could they fit inside that head as they bound
together, bit their house into being?

Or was the nest a heart, bouncing and heavy
at the end of the branch? Soon, my friends
counted the grains of rice on my plate
and gave me sunny strips of mango.
What can I bring home for my mother and father?
Markets are lined with scarves but I want us
fed and beloved. If only I could feed us backwards
and leave us so milk-riven even our ancestors are gratified.

But my forebears refuse. The dead are tight-lipped.
With their spit, their work they wanted me,
kept on wanting long after they went.
That’s why they kept their children fed.
I swallow the last crumb and lick the plate clean.
I am as bound to travel as I am bound
to fail them, to spend the days
they gave me craving.