Quintin Collins
the bees rebuild
today we build a new home,
the old hive foam-smothered
—bodies dropped, writhed—
but today, new honeycombs
to nest our young, collect honey
—some twitched
for days. we move on, restart
—dandelions bloom. everything
burned last time. everything
fluorescent in sunlight. we
rebuild today. we gather pollen
—before that, it was a hose.
we sting. yes, we sting. we sting
only once, only carefully.
we know we will die
if we sting.
they swat. we sting.
today we build a new home—
if we can save what we love,
what is death?
we sting.
some days, on peony petals,
we nap because we are tired.
we tire of how they swat. we sting
to protect—
maybe if we didn’t sting.
maybe if we didn’t fight—
we sting,
but only to protect the hive.
last time, everything burned,
but not before they scraped honey
from our home.some bodies
burned—today we restart. today we
rebuild our home.at sundown, what poison
will douse these honeycombs?
what fire—
what else can we do but sting?
—Submitted on 05/11/2020
Quintin Collins is the author of The Dandelion Speaks of Survival, forthcoming from Cherry Castle Publishing in 2021. His poems have appeared in Up the Staircase Quarterly, Glass Poetry Press, Poems2go, Transition Magazine, Ghost City Review, and other journals, as well as in the anthology A Garden of Black Joy: Global Poetry from the Edges of Liberation and Living (Wise Ink Creative Publishing, 2020), edited by Keno Evol. Collins is assistant director of the Solstice Low-Residency MFA program at Pine Manor College in Newton, Mass. Twitter @qcollinswriter.
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