A Bed of Bees
by Tyler Deaton
You read your fortune cookie:
April brings showers sweet with fruit
that end those droughts of March,
then asked to go by April. Later we
stood by a pond, when it was calm,
and saw a skyline upside down.
A passing plane wrote: April will be
the cruelest month. I wondered if you
did a downward dog, near the bank,
if you’d see the clouds or a plume
of smoke? I breathed into my fist
to keep myself warm; something
compelled my fingers to unfurl,
and there was a stamen in my palm.
You asked, which came first: the flower
or the bee? And I said, why should they matter
when neither of us take honey with our brie?
Off a bit, funnel clouds stretched like a claw
in a crane game, picking up a subdivision;
we were glad there was room for a high-rise now.
But then you trembled when I extended my hand.
I swear it’s not radioactive;
WebMD has no idea why it’s black,
crumbling. Something brushes your eyelash,
and there’s a spasm in your eyes as you
text away. Were there bluebonnets by the pond,
last year? My memories are molting; my Sperry’s
are crunching on a bed of bees. Even as I ask
April’s doing cartwheels through a forest
fire, and the ash is doing cartwheels
off her flats, and I swear there’s splendor