I Mean To Say

This place is a palace of honey. I write because I cannot sing.
Each night my neighbors gather on the front stoop to drink
and cook and sing together in their home language—the same
my mother spoke as a child, and sang to me, and I to you.
Bees buzz here and there in the summer atmosphere making
it more beautiful with their buzzing sounds. Morning glory
deep-lake blue, twists up fire escape rails, fountainous. Petals
decorate their throats with negative charges which bumblebees
collect like polyglots. Their eyes gather information on light
intensity and patterning, and electromagnetic fields, invisible
signals of ready blossoms or hazards. Beyond the tips of each
pistil is a swarm of words—already honey! In the wind I hear
tenderness and mouth the sounds just like I always did
at synagogue to feel a part of something. The fan turns with
hymnal cadences. See how pollen intercedes, drifting between
the dark center and flight path? Holding this pen, a wan-blue
vein along my inner wrist splits toward my hand in a shape
I might describe as divining rod, tuning fork or wishbone.
Bees actively adjust their droning frequency to shake multiple
electrostatically-charged pollen grains off flowers into their
pouches, more precisely, corbicula, which shares a root with corbita,
a slow ship of burden. The Blue Orchard worker bee is atypical
in the way she davens several times into the flower for the golden
food and carries it back to the children, to be accurate, the hive.
The trees ululate, swell, vibrate like a zither. Is my nostalgia a mania
for belonging or just a stage of decay? In efforts to protect—more
precisely, aerate—her hive and the honey, the pitch of buzzing notes
rises in sync with her beating heart, I mean to say, her wings.

Read more from Issue No. 25 or share on Twitter.