Lou Gallo

Raining Ants

We found hundreds of frozen ants
in my grandmother’s refrigerator,
fat ones, spilled like caviar.
We blew them out with an electric fan,
swept the debris into a dust pan.
A few stuck to the freezer,
affixed, I guess, with some
tough death glue.  They probably came
from an arid hill under the house
thinking life would improve inside.
My grandmother was in the hospital
fighting another kind of freeze.
She wouldn’t be back.
The stiff corpses flung
into a garbage bag
sounded like raindrops
battering a tarpaulin.
It’s raining everywhere,
on the moon, on Mars,
on the roof, inside my head.
It rains in an old lady’s refrigerator,
rains ants.  When cold
sweeps down from the north
to this oven of a city,
there will be more ice
than we can chip away with picks.

 

Lou Gallo work has appeared in Glimmer Train, Berkeley Fiction Review,
Missouri Review, Southern Quarterly, New Orleans Review, Mississippi
Review, Portland Review, Story South, Bellingham Review, Greensboro
Review, Tampa Review, The Ledge, New Oregon Review, Pennsylvania
Literary Review, Rattle, Baltimore Review, Texas Review.