Forget the sycamores and the skinny girls stalked on uptown trains, alone.

Forget that everything is something trembling on the brink of something else.
              Forget home and the soup mama made, smoothness in your belly, sap like honey
                                                                         dripping outside a peeling paned window.

Snapping bees are offering us their consecration again.

They are making us anxious, orbiting around our heads.

They are making us think of consequence and coincidence, to remember them.
         They are carved into our skin beside poetry, reduced to represent our allegiance to a
                                                                                                          chosen sentient life.
They have been copulating with the grasshoppers and fireflies again, the wind heavy with
                                          their pollens, they are more cloying than they will ever know.

They survive together. They are stupefying me with precise aerial intelligence and agility.

How they escalate into spiked green chambers, sucking nutrition from veins, slamming                                                                                                      treasures into secret striped pockets.

They are trying to make me careless, vulnerable to enemies of my manageable cause.

They don’t want to be distracted from their own invention.

They are singing to us, how they return each season, bringing wisdom from another
world, imagination is in the heart, the rest is memory, the horrifying personal truth.

How long will it be before we put on our mesh suits and protective work gloves?

How long will I watch for bees and cower when I find them?
    How long with the spring and the solitary skinny girls, and something if not anything
suspicious and waiting with a freckled nose pushed against the glass of a window, and the
                                                      scream of thehunted one who just wants to go home?

Brie Huling