A Friend Gifts Me a Paper Bag of Honeycomb
· The Atlantic
I hold the vacant cradles in my palm:
wax wan-white, honey-drained, ringed
with dirt and gray. I arrange the shells
atop the coffee table’s grain: an atlas
of foreclosure left to empty on the branch.
I think about catastrophe more than poetry.
The colony that fled my neighbor’s keep
leaving behind the flightless brood
and then expiring in the field. The shoddy room
in Lincoln where my mother died, strung out,
with a bullet in her head. No one wants
a place like that but me: yellow-stained
with nicotine, waxy blinds pulled down
against the cracking glass. In the archive
of images on Google Maps I watch
its slow decay. Walls left to bend
and bleach, the front lot overgrown
with weeds where now the feral bees
must love to swarm, rattling the tickseed,
buzzing in the bluestem grass, building
sticky hives behind the rotting boards.
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