She went to a wedding
where only the bride’s mother
was known to her, a stranger
to the souls who came to push
the teenagers’ canoe into
the backwater of their lives.
She wore a blue-laced dress
in a sea of denim and a city sway
amid a marriage party in camo.
She looked up from the girl’s
unexpected belly to see sparse
fields with thin cattle, two trucks
down on their axels, a hive body
on the front porch, somebody’s
baby in a shitty pamper, the distant
stack of the coal plant downstream
of the river.     The thrown garter
glanced off her shoulder, landed
in the dust, motes swirled around
like a medieval fair and all the fair
ladies seemed blanched.            After
a piece of the fallen cake, she heard
the mother’s voice rise as in prayer:
Kerstin keeps bees