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.
The post A Friend Gifts Me a Paper Bag of Honeycomb appeared first on The Atlantic.
