Job
In life you have a job,
your calling,
Your soul.
This thing makes you happy.
Something fun to you.
That is different for all of us,
and we all have a different opinion, too.
Saturday shopping
wishing and wanting.
Long ago me
trying to choose
from all that I see.
Jacks, trading cards, pretty yoyos
paper dolls and jumping ropes
doll milk bottles and dresses
combs for their tresses.
Pink pearl nail polish
Archie comics to relish
cologne – Lilly of the Valley
fake lipstick – taste of raspberry.
Not enough coins, need more
for the ones I adore.
Today’s browsing done
pick a red vase for Mum.
-Sue Neufarth Howard
Guard the crayon scribbles that ran from the
light switch plate cover to the dusty old baseboards
and hold me accountable for every scratch on the hardwood.
There were countless race cars swallowed
by the AC grates. The house where I got my first hand pop and my lips zipped tight . Wrists don’t sit limp. Mom’s voice had bass
“Get your hands off your imagination”, rattled the walls.
I never kept possessions close lest weed crumbs
fall out of grims fairy tales. Just beyond the portiere,
mom’s man knew pawn shops ate new VCRs like lumber to a chipper.
Think about how He held on to the phone cord snatched from the wall
swung around his head in a tremendous performance.
I laughed at this tragicomic melodrama of abuse. I still do.
After the show the house had the deepest closets for me to sit.
Clutch steak knife, clutch cast iron, clasped hands, right thumb on top.
The house knew to hold mommas perfume lingering in the coat closet to be my shroud.
Or the old mold smell in the attic to wait things out.
That sickly sweet miasma that makes me nostalgic
for the dark and the damp. I’d hide in the penumbra as the hatch was cracked.
I like to think that house still holds on today.
Foundation to shingles standing tall and proud.
Cause if that house had slipped its grip even a little, i
would’ve fallen straight through the cracks.
I know enough, at least, as to approach the hive,
not from straight on but from the side, otherwise
a threat is seen, and potentially, an onslaught
of sentries sent out to save their queen.
In truth, I’m a beginner, with so many doubts
about the motives of my need to keep a colony
and play the master of the bees.
But when the little wooden box with screen sides arrived,
a mated queen and 10,000 living beings inside,
there was no time to contemplate philosophy.
My frames assembled, boxes primed and well dried,
I donned my suit, lit the smoke, and improvised.
Like clockwork I did fill
their water bowl with sugar syrup.
Once a week, I’d pry the sticky lid and then inside
a cloud of drones I’d stand enveloped.
I would, at first, swallow my fears,
that they would not see,
behind my veil of secrecy,
the terror in my eyes.
Through summer I remained
amazed at new comb
drawn out on wooden frames,
and quickly did I learn to add
the new frames soon, or else
the bees would weave a comb
on their own amorphous loom.
In dreams I pondered
on the forms they might construe
if they were left
to sculpt with hexagons
as their hive mind would do.
Each week they seemed to multiply,
and once stung
I understood just why the gloves were necessary.
They stored such a vast supply. My suit, no longer
white, turned splotchy yellow. Those pine boxes grew
so honey-laden heavy, hard to carry.
I feared of the varroa mite, and kept close watch
but saw no sight of that tiny scourge. I set traps
for the hive beetle, though my attempts were feeble,
it seemed I would catch one and ten emerge.
Then, when the beetles left, for reasons I know not yet,
I felt a great relief to spot the healthy queen
in her brood chamber in the lowest frame,
surrounded by a cast of workers keeping guard.
I tossed my veil and danced a jig about the yard.
Winter fast approached and so
I insulated underneath with bales of straw,
stuck a shim under the lid to ventilate,
put a stone on top for weight,
and waited for the spring to thaw.
Now to open winter’s mystery,
and unravel its cruel twists of plot, frame on frame
of honey left, but the bees are not.
There are two hundred, maybe,
lying on the bottom screen,
but no movement, no buzzing,
as far as I can see,
no queen.
I take a few, maybe ten, into my palm
and as they spill with lifeless bodies I am given still
to hope I might have seen a tiny leg stretch out,
a sign of life within. But as with many things we love
and cannot understand, in their death, all
that seems to give them life is the tremble in our hands.
I am left to wonder where and why this colony is gone.
Perhaps the pesticides of surrounding farms.
Perhaps too much moisture in the hive,
Perhaps it was the varroa mite.
Perhaps the queen and colony have swarmed
to a nearby hollow tree, alive.
In which case I would most hope the comb
they draw in that dark space
is a shape not yet imagined by my lower race.
(after David Budbill)
Randall must be down on Pinhook Road,
today’s the day to cultivate his tobacco
and he’s probably in a small fret.
With Wendesday’s mailers & flyers
he’s must be hitting every house
from here to Pickway
When I catch the muffler of his jeep
rising up the hollow from Beerkey
I stand near the box to be ready…
wanna hear him say what he says:
where you’re at
is the most important place to be
the window booth at a bar
back pew on a sunday
the radio and a sundress
bottle tops and the truth spin
time stalls
keeps you young
when the bleachers are crowded
when the rain is pourin’
when you’re standing in the moment,
every life has a soundtrack
let me be
that melody
:a cento poem
wanna be that song
By brett eldredge
a nightly routine fit for a rat king:
nesting sheets in a non-Euclidean braid
or haggling with hair that wants to circumvent itself.
the toothpaste must be locked in a labyrinth
the way it refuses to respond to muster,
and don’t you think
that stars have never had a luster, shiny beads of night sweats
at best
and that unsleeping thoughts cloud
and clot
and cluster
like a magnet in an oven hot.
blue phone glow will fester
out your eyeballs
and aids will rot
the next day,
and more you struggle, the more invested,
the less and less you get rested.
One time supposedly friend
Confident, my ear
to help me
through those days
Now you suffer
stage 4, you say
Lung cancer
they told you
Love my cigs, you say
What’re you
going to do
radiation, chemo
with ensuing
chemo brain
Who will you call
while having your scotch
at 10:30 every
nights sleep
to talk one way
for your listener
And how do you
feel now,
Mister Death
Head first, throw yourself
into the grotto
with lavender bath salts
and tea tree oil.
You burn incense and
sage.
A little bottle over the carport window.
Auspicious
(I think?)
You make spell bags –
real witch shit,
not lightning bolts and wizard hats –
cheeks red when you tell me.
I don’t believe in many things;
I love how much you do.
You’ll throw yourself
full force
Zero Waste™
and then 2 years later
bash the movement
for astroturfing
Capitalism
with sheepskin totes.
But more than anything
I love that you throw yourself
full force,
head first
with me –
baby on my shoulders
handprints on my glasses –
no looking back.
