the ants
after i saw the tv glow (2024)
there’s a neon ice cream truck
in the cul-de-sac. on the ground
beside it, a brilliant pink, blue
popsicle, ants crawling across.
some toddler must have dropped
it, tried to pick it up, got sticky
wriggled, as one of their parents
gently wiped off their
hands, their mouth
the truck drives off, but,
the popsicle lies, there, still, under
the ants, the afternoon moon, slowly, melting
in the way washing magenta sharpie
off of skin, scrubbing it, still
leaves a ghost of the color
since you left, i’ve been finding ants, on
top of my books, in my glasses of water,
my socks, my bed, crawling on my body
sterling-elizabeth arcadia
sterling-elizabeth arcadia (she/they) is a Best of the Net winning trans writer and lover of birds, cats, movies, and her friends. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers—Camden, and is pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Connecticut. Recent publications include beestung, ONLY POEMS, Verse of April, Boxx Press, and Prose Online.
Why it knocked Martheaus out:
So I have a really big love of ekphrastic work (isn't that such an odd word?). As I have seen from your work, you do well to place the speaker exactly where they need to be within the narrative or response to the piece. What really comes together for me here, is how this poem captures the really intimate relationship people of marginalized identities have with media that actually gives their stories the foreground. The sense of interiority works so well because I truly believe this TV show is special to the speaker. Knowing a little about the show, I can see that you've specifically narrowed in on just a few of the moments and symbols (that show is chock full of strange and interesting moments and imagery and time-skips). The ice cream truck, the colors, and the moment of disappearance with the one character (Maddy, right?) seem to be the main selections from the show.
On a craft level, I'm a huge fan of how this poem handles pacing and tone. I'm not always a fan of using those words because they seem hard to pin down, but I think your poem clearly displays how to use those elements effectively. For instance, the pacing of this poem is slower--partly because of the line breaks, partly because of the use of commas, partly because of the word choices, the slow melting plot, and partly because of the "observational voice." Poems that spend a lot of time watching and describing ("there's a blank over here," "there's a blank over there") read slower typically. All of this is impressive to me because this is mainly how we feel the horror, pain, and sense of loss at the start of the poem.
I also just have to say that twist at the end was so wonderful. You're reading along and then--BAM. You get the "you" address. The poem shows itself to have been about this sense of absence, and it leaves room to start to see the metaphor of the melting and abandoned ice cream in a new light
I personally love love love poems that respond or are in artistic conversation with other works of art (this is called ekphrasis for all the people who want another fancy word in their back pocket). Can you write a little about your relationship with I Saw the TV Glow or ekphrasis as a mode in poetry?
Ekphrasis, for a long time I thought of ekphrasis as the primary mode in which my poetry operated, so I love that you are bringing this up. One of the things that excites me most about ekphrasis is how open and expansive it can be, which I didn't realize when I was first engaging with it. Ekphrasis can be so much more than just a description of the art at hand, which it's often described as. I've found that art often inspires me to reflect on my own life in new ways, and that's a lot of what I've been doing lately, using images or themes from something (in this case the movie I Saw the TV Glow) as a lens through which to look at, even re-narrativize, events or dynamics from my own life. I watched I Saw the TV Glow three times in theatres, which should tell you a little bit about how much I like it. It's written and directed by the amazing trans filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun, and is a heartbreaking allegory for transness.
The images of the poem all seem to be so emotionally driven: the neon sign, the ants crawling everywhere at the end. In fact, it seems like a great deal of the poem is relying on those images to really drive home (ha, drive like a popsicle truck) the internal feelings of the speaker. How did these images come to you and how'd you think through selecting or leaving behind the pictures that came to you?
On top of how affective the story of I Saw the TV Glow is, the visuals of the film are so strikingly beautiful, so some of the imagery came from that: the ice cream truck, the road, the neon, and the colors of the popsicle (which are also the colors of the trans pride flag). The heart of the film is really about missed opportunity, or lost happiness/life/fulfillment, and one of the ways this is shown is through the repeated disappearance of the main character's close friend. When I wrote this poem, I had recently been broken up with by someone who was just coming out as trans, and having a child was something they had talked about a few times. I saw the lost opportunity of a full, trans life in the movie, and imagined it as the toddler I put on the page—imagined a future of a family with another trans person. That "pink, blue / popsicle" is the imagined messiness of raising a child as a visibly gender non-conforming parent. I'm just realizing this now, as I answer this question, though, so now I'm wondering what it means that the parents in the poem wipe the popsicle off of the toddler! The speaker of the poem, though, is not either of those parents. They're someone who's been left. The ants, which were inspired by an ant infestation in my house, an infestation which made me very hesitant to ever have that ex in my space, come in as this steady decay of everything this speaker is looking at. So the ants, and the other details in the last stanza, I drew from life, but all the images were so, so emotionally driven.
I haven't finished all of the series, but when I saw the tv show referenced in the epigraph, I couldn't help but see a poem informed by the queer experience. "Experience" is an odd word there because I think what I really want to say is "living" and "embodiment." I hope I'm not seeing past something here, so can you speak a little on what embodiments we're seeing in this poem?
Yeah, I think a lot of the film, and the poem, are about this lingering, almost physical feeling of something being off, being missing, and for the film that thing that keeps scratching at the main character can easily be read as repressed gender dysphoria, which is just this feeling of unease. For me, at least, I felt something like that around my sexuality as well as my gender, so I think it's a really common experience for people who maybe haven't realized they're queer yet. What I tried to capture in my poem is this feeling of distance or dissociation that often comes with dysphoria; the speaker is describing a scene where something is just not quite right, and in the last stanza, it's revealed that the not-quite-rightness has to do with what the speaker has lost, and also, to do, with their body. The way the ants on the popsicle are supposed to feel off, the ants on the speaker's body are supposed to give that same uncanniness. Obviously something is wrong if you're finding ants on yourself, but it's not just this outside ant infestation, it's the speaker's separation from their own body, the way they list it just as another item the ants have been crawling on, another thing that is now kind of removed from being able to be comfortably wanted or touched, like that popsicle, which, covered with ants, can no longer be eaten.