Going Somewhere
By Sheri Reda
How do we defend this way we have of birthing
monsters to watch us die? Ants
are not so lonely as us but we disparage them
and yes, I’m speaking for you. I’m not the only one
with shakable faith.
Ants carry on their backs large burdens
and certain purpose, the one enabling the other.
We don’t believe in such codependency though
we envy the charming fountains and village squares.
We’ll never again depend upon that
pre-Depression bungalow on the Chicago River
or modest mid-century townhouse
squeezed into a side street at the Beaches
or forever-falling-down villa
in the second smallest town in Tuscany.
We can’t have what we have and have that
be our lives. Same everywhere. If you attend
the First Congregational Church
in Darien you don’t get the liturgy
at Nuestra Señora Del Monte in Cicero
or volunteer time at the Gran Kermes Festival
and raise more money than last year
while the quinceañeras continue
apace
at home
without you.
You can move to Westwood from Chaoyang
or Nikon Town or Tulsa
but you’ll never be a native. No one will
ever fully understand why your father
always folded his pants so carefully
before throwing them into the laundry or
why you pause before touching
those metal screen-door handles.
It’s true that if fibromyalgia finds you,
river blindness probably won’t. If
your children are laid open to malaria
they’re probably safe from leukemia. None of us get all
the pain though some of us grab most of the money
to steady us on the icy steps to the grand portico
we crave. To be human is not to belong, even if you do join
the army navy air force savings club Burning Man
Davos or one Sundance or another.
To be human is to not belong. To be pierced
by longing. To stagger into thorny unwelcome
in the waning wilderness where you find yourself
target practice for ticks and mere ambience
for ants who hitch a ride on shirtsleeves
where you once thought about wearing your heart.
Those ants are going somewhere while we try not to rot.
2.
The good news: I do and so do you. Rot
like the rest. Crumble to the dirt or dissipate to sky
and birds can pick us clean and shit us back
out to be swallowed whole—ingested, digested,
egested and taken up again, sifted through baleen,
down through esophagus, stomach, other stomach,
final stomach, duodenum, done. Back to the ocean floor.
We needn’t be born again, but we all get to die.
The bad news: we don’t know this is good news.
3.
An ant can lift twenty times her own sorrows:
admirable to those of us who find our sheets heavy
in the morning, who long to throw them
to the wind. An ant will fight to the death for love
or anyway one last fuck: remarkable
to those of us who undress in the dark. Or never.
We think them armored but they wear their very bones
on the outside. One or two or three or three hundred
thousands may laze while the queen lays
or go home when heavy traffic hits the tunnel
or hang back and let the other ants get the job done.
They know when death takes them someone will
cart them away, as do we cart the fallen
though we sometimes find it difficult to tell who’s dead
and who’s simply rotting in advance.
We try to do it without help from ants or sea dandelions
or any other reminders of the ways we fall short.
Or long. Or otherwise outside the bounds of
Sovereignty—we all want to be queen.
So we hold our kids close and cover their ears with
technologies, and the little monsters are so diverting
we can mine them for years of distractions
before we die and leave only a blown-out husk
and nothing left to nourish anyone or anything.
Sheri Reda lives in Chicago, where she works as a celebrant, public speaker, and youth librarian. Her poems have appeared in Eocene Journal of Environmental Humanities (2025, 2023), The Nature of Our Times (2024), and the award-winning Dear Human at the Edge of Time (Paloma Press, 2024). She is the author of Stubborn (LocofoChaps/Moria Press, 2017). Her collection entitled Diaspora will be published by Finishing Line Press in 2026.
