Wasp Quartet
by Kaley Hutter
/
In my new town, I dream of wasps burrowing
in our backs, making brands you name tattoos: we are trying
to touch them with our ribs: enjoy ex-
cavation: you coach me towards place, say Imagine
your palm on a magnolia, like this, and your
shoulder blade pulses: the mark leaks away: a wasp
forages out from your flesh: I close my eyes
and smell Charlottesville.
Listen, the day burns, throws its first hook
and sends the skin of the house boiling,
still my thumbs won’t churn in starry sap: Here,
you say in the dream, try again, the trunk roiling:
my body auditions soil, digging for place: I try from here,
and then I try from here:
//
The wasps build trails on the glass sliding door.
Yesterday I stole
home to one on the doorknob,
drowned it, wrote an elegy shaped like two wings:
I am trying to touch trees in the rooms of my mind,
I am trying to forgive a town: tell me who told it
I count the lines on its belly, who remembers
the tunneling into bone: this one
infiltrates the wall by my head: look, watch me spray
to kill: go gentle into this good spite:
help me pluck abdomen from glass, lift it here,
wipe here, and here.
///
In the dream I grew a garden
in the small of your back, and you laughed under the scuttling sky:
you said, Look, you said, I’m blooming.
Did you hear them pollinating, sliding
in the cylinders: they plant nests in the roof, everywhere
is fizzing now: they like us, ha:
here’s my distraction, insect eulogies,
listen, a beady lineage bites
the glass: overnight they sink in skin: surely you hear the velocity
in this new strain of dark, surely you smell wings
in the sores on my spine:
tell me something
about the house you grew up in. Tell me about
the trees. Are you still trying to touch them in the mouth
of your mind? Teach me how: teach here, here,
then here—
////
Tell me the morning still clocks you awake,
that we both wait sweating for a new sound
in the hairy dawn, bony, wide: skeletonize my name
with an alphabet you invent, and I’ll tell you
about the night I spent, where wasps birded above
our heads, and we marched under wheeling wings and legs:
tell me again I should open up.
Tell me if you mean like a book or like a door, if you want
to read me or enter me. I am trying to fix a fizzy
listening in this first take of day, this silence that takes and takes
the shape of branches. We choose how our branded
bodies climb them, yes? Hang here. Hang here. Here.