An Answer
       

Each box thrums like a buried heart, gives
as the heart gives. Until collapse. Working
the memory of venom from my hands, medallions

of hello, Spring's down payment. Sun ekes out
mist after morning's slap of rain, the beehive

rising to a pitch of almost, of fury,
the wait, atoms heated and trying to disperse.
I am dressed as an ineffectual god—colors that claim

no fervor from them, nor invoke the fur of predator.
I am pleased, unnoticed while working.

Only when they're alarmed, if I forget
the smoker, will the stingers dig me. I fight
the suspicion they would steal from me—

not mosquitoes with their derrick forms.
My reflex: swat, and only then consider

the ripples rolling outward from under my palm:
fish tip out of the boiling oceans and drop
into the sky, tugged by the moon's thin line; Nor'easters

stalk the autumn coast drunk through startled-bare
forests. I savor the thought's little fat on my tongue; I've lost

three summers of weight around the waistline
and I'm not sure I'll get the hang of this. I don't know why
we exist but I know whose hands these are, who I am, I know

everything they touch. In two days I'll open the hives
to find them bare, not even a corpse. Teeth picked clean.

I see rivers boil under the flowers they ferry, bees plunging toward
those petals to drown in the acid. And how could they
be saved? Today I do nothing but watch them ease back

into the rainless sky, un-disappeared, the mass of them hovering
like an empty thought bubble, or at least, empty of words

known to me. Each a curled letter, each its own striped flag.

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Copyright © 2020 Brandon Amico All rights reserved
from Disappearing, Inc.
Gold Wake Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission