When one great love was done,
finished, I wanted to know the bees.
So I painted beehives the color of blushing dahlias
and worked the secret earth room of my body down into them,
each tired muscle, each sad hip—a bottomless longing pulse
from my limbs. In my ears a song loop—not a mother, not a love.
An insect buzzing from my ribs, each unwinged thing,
shut in. On my narrow balcony, I painted sundown,
I let the color wash my skin. Then
in my borrowed garden, I leveled the ground and lay
the pallets and stacked the supers and hung the frames,
and opened the boxes of 20,000 bees in the rain.
In the rain, my friend Joshua held the umbrella and I
dropped them in. And it was like pouring
a flock of doves into the air,
an impossible ecstatic thing. They dipped,
they lifted, quick as an armful of musical notes,
they tumbled, they spun and the sound they made
was a song-loop, a winged congregation—buzzing and
untamable, lipped with pollen, vibrating with devotion.
I laid down the queens in their sugared cages, little boxes
tamped in and they swarmed ‘round
and I was covered in smoke and yellow light
and humming and I let them take me. They took me.
And in the emptiness of all the days after
and in the stinging honey-battered air, I found
a beginning. And if they stung I would say—yes,
and hold still as they dropped into my hair.
And I would say—I’m sorry, say—thank you:
to feel the earth of my body root,
to feel my face a small pink blossom, warmed,
fragrant of pollen of honey of aster of clover.
Anya Kirshbaum is a queer poet and somatic therapist living in Seattle, Washington with her partner and family. Her work has appeared in The Comstock Review, Cirque, MER-Mom Egg Review, and Crannóg. She was a finalist for the New Millennium Writing Awards, and was the recipient of the 2023 Banyan Poetry Prize.
