Beekeeper with a Collar By Maya Victoria Clubine

Beekeeper with a Collar

I sat in long grass, stacks of deeps above
me, towering. No reason could I find --
or seem to understand their musical
hum, endless rhyme -- like the working song
vibrating down in the mines, looking for
nuggets of gold, salvation, or for air. 

I cast a net o’er top of my curls, feeling
safe. Feeling enclosed; cloistered in my self-
imposed corner. The yellow-collared bee-
keeper blew the smoke between crevices, 
calming the colony, sending them home.
They’ll store their sugar away just in case

tonight will be the night the world will blaze. 
He hands me honeycomb, sticky in my
palm, saying: this is what the honey wants
to taste like. I scoop it with my tongue, careful
to not leave crumbs. The workers gather round
the residue: fragments of golden air.

They moved in, and within, and out, collecting
dust, storing luxury, and honouring
their Queen in ecstasy. Then we came in --
All net and knife and latex, disrupting
their rhythm, scraping off wax with a few
more casualties than called for. To make the
candles for congregations of our own.

Maya Victoria Clubine is an emerging writer based in Montréal, QC. She studied English Literature at the University of Waterloo, where she was awarded the Albert Shaw Poetry Prize and the English Society Creative Writing for Poetry Award. She is an MFA candidate at the University of St. Thomas, Houston. She has published in Bywords, The South Shore Review and The Literary Review of Canada. You can find her on twitter and instagram @mayaclubine.