America Is Just a Negro in an Anthill

By Morgan Varnado
My southern grampa is as America a negro can be
surrounded by red ants. I don’t know who owned his back-
yard first, the ants or his lawn mower, but somehow
both found themselves in Mississippi
looking for food and a back to put it on.

He is the absence of  bugs.
His home is the places where we managed
to scrape off the cicada buzz like a hose
scratching clean lines into a muddy truck.

He is most America when he’s driving
up north to visit his grandkids. He runs
the whole Great Migration without taking a moment to rest.
He is sitting in my living room, speaking
through the wet filter he calls country tongue

and I forgot which end of the nation I’m sitting on.
America slips from his mouth like the name of an old cousin
long moved away. A game he used to play in his youth.
A song he used to sing with the ticks

before they started biting.
My northern grampa is just a southern negro
who bears the winter to avoid the bugs.
One time a spider had the gall to show its face
in my 1st grade classroom. I reached out my arms

to protect it as we shuffled to the front door.
Covering it from the spit of my classmates
who wanted it stomped.
I think I mean this when I ask my grampa

why he never played with Emmett Till.
Why he never was a blanket
to protect him from the cicadas, or the boot.
When my grampa replies with “he was just another kid
from the next neighborhood over”

I realize no one knew Emmett could be squashed.
Both of my grampas tell the same stories
while scratching the same bug bites.
Ain’t god make us niggas itchy.

My favorite game to play with the bugs
is “guess who’s the one infesting my home.”
The bugs always point the first finger.
Spit out the first name. Bite toward my family.
To be America and a negro,

is to come from a long line of  homeless people
with bug infestations. There isn’t a part of my family
tree that isn’t smacking its arms: Either squashing insects
or confusing itself for what’s crawling.

Notes:

This piece is included in Respect the Mic: Celebrating 20 Years of Poetry from a Chicagoland High School, edited by Hanif Abdurraqib, Franny Choi, Peter Kahn, and Dan Sullivan. Published by Penguin Workshop. All poems are copyright of their respective authors.

Source: Poetry (December 2021)