‘How To: Gut a Hive’
— Nix Thérèse
I’ll admit that I’m a sucker for a poem that purports to teach, so the “how to” in the title immediately had my ear perked. Yet, what seemed straightforward, is rightly complicated in the first line: “dumping human lives / like old cocoons in / rented trash containers.” What I originally thought would be a high-functioning beesnest quickly becomes human, or rather its absence in the abandoned quarters waiting to be wiped. The spin from seeming commotion to just footsteps & quick hands feels abundantly quiet, making the step into the space feel even more tense. I was struck by how much the stacked form presents an anxiety: you can’t freely move across the columns, but rather have to go down one until it bends into the next like a series of hallways, which feels maze-like in its constraint. Likewise, we can only process information in snippets: the five word maximum per line doesn’t often lend itself to encapsulated thoughts, but ones that scatter instead. Already the pacing makes the sweeps feel more reluctant / distracted, done out of necessity rather than real fervor to clear out remnants.
The speaker seeing themself reflected in the leftover spices is especially tender: “adobo / sazon and paprika / soaked into me like a / beautiful suffocation of/ familiarity embedding an / already dirty child’s / fingernails just as the / Melipona saves wax to / please the queen without / a stinger.” What a stark transmutation—what once flavored the recipes that someone else survived on has now turned into dirt to wash out; what once nourished the speaker now grows tainted next to their grit. It’s hard to imagine a mouth getting fed in this landscape where nothing seems to thrive. A cocoon is just a shell without the transformation shaking inside. Even the clearers are “fighting for / nectar on [their] own side / of the comb,” hovering only just above those who have already lost the chance to cultivate their hive. I note the bee making itself useful in its deficit of nectar. How often might we might need to spin wax when honey is too far out of reach? To gut a hive, then, is to realize that it can’t be all sweetness.