Nuptial Flights And Mating, Or
     On Advising My New Housemate Karl How To Write A Personal Ad

                      By Tenaya Darlington


It was the summmer the ants kept rising
out of the kitchen drain.
I said, start w/ something like
"New to Bloomington."  It sounds less desperate.
Fig. 2-4 diagrams the foundation
of two types of ant colonies:
a) independent founding
and b) swarming.
You subletted the room next door,
moved into my evenings.
I'd heard
you'd been engaged to a woman in China.
After two years of aerogrammes,
she sent them all back,
accepted a scholarship to Harvard.
You moved here.  Stretched antennae.
It is an almost exclusively female society
w/ the males remaining in the nest only
until their invariably fatal nuptial flight.
I said, say "friends first,
possible long term relationship".
Mention Thai food.
It was the first summer
we really started drinking.
In some extreme cases,
this maturation point
comes w/ the accumulation
of only a few tens of workers.
Don't say "Will answer all replies".
Every word after 35 costs a dollar.
Don't use the words:
broke, average,
carnivorous, smooth,
or spectator sports.
{\em Monogyny} refers to
the possession of a colony
by a single queen.

The yard was all movement then,
and we talked about love
on the porch
after I got home from teaching poetry.
The vanilla candles
attracted bugs.  Sometimes,
my friend Kay would come over
for a screwdriver
and talk about the way
her first real boyfriend
dumped her
for his neurotic, exotic ex.
The vast majority of virgin queens
die within hours
of leaving the mother nets.
Most are destroyed by predators (Fig. 3-4).
We talked about how  to kill them.
It got so that I just used my index finger
instead of a paper towel.  I said,
describe yourself instead
of the woman you're after.
If the area is dominated
by stable, mature colonies
females who read the personals
will get a sense of yuo, and
only one or two of the queens,
providing you have the right qualities,
will become the progenetrices
of new colonies.
The females choose the males,
and if you list a mantra
of instructions
i.e. no piercings or bleached blondes, please
most of the rest will die
before they can construct a first shelter.
You were worried it would feel mechanical,
mail-order almost.
I said, we can't leave the sugar out like this.