Honeybee

by A.M. Kennedy

In the summer we sit and drink hot tea, run the fortune leaves
around the bottom of the cup, rinse the unlucky.
In the garden at sunrise we sit, effervescent
like sticky–sweet honeybees.

You don’t have to read to know how to press bluebells between
the pages of brittle paper bibles until they bleed
indigo and aromatic, flat but everlasting.

They tell you first that no one wants a thing with sting and no
flower,
so they teach nail filing on the chalkboard by practicing cursive,
how to flow like a river, how to bend like a stem to sunlight.

By afternoon some of the girls do grow cymbal forearms,
ambition like a storm head, a lava slick of sour, they run afoul
unapologetically with flinty smiles and overly sharp teeth.

But by June or July, they’re taken to learn how to
make a honeymoon so sweltering the night sky wanes in salt,
how to part thighs like earth blooms and new growth.

A mother holds tea parties with a bowl of poisoned sugar,
we sit in a crescent with our wounds all exposed and have
another.
When we hit the fall, it’s a slow and thick descend across the
sheets,

sticky, but bitter as the Sungkai.