Ashley Mo

Everything I Learned about Death, I Learned from Three Ants

After you lowered into the Earth,
the ants kept coming. They dismantled
a wounded moth before me— thorax, leg, wing.
They each held a piece. They marched in a line,
in a patient procession. They knew what to do
with a body that could no longer answer.
By this time, the bacteria have consumed you.
Did you know there is more life in and on the body
than there is body itself? You were never truly
your own. I watched an ant crawl into the mouth
of the moth, learning the shape
of absence. They will soon scale your larynx, too,
pass thickened mucus, empty you of voice
just as they emptied the moth of flight.
When you die you are free, yes,
but those you leave behind are bound, or drifting,
or still strung on to fingers that will not tighten
around theirs. Understand dying in one’s sleep is not
painless, nor truly peaceful. They told me you looked calm
so I would not envision
the terror, the confusion, the last stubborn rattling
in your throat as the heart gave out.

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Ashley Mo is a senior at the Harker School in California. Her poetry has appeared in the Roanoke Review, Blue Marble Review, Eunoia Review, DePaul’s Blue Book and National Poetry Quarterly. A finalist for the Santa Clara County Youth Poet Laureate, she has also received recognition from the Alliance for Young Artists, Princeton University, Columbia Granger and the city of Saratoga. She is an alumna of the Iowa Young Writers' Studio, the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop and the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference.