As Bee

Forgive my trespass, I mistook for work a crown

of raspberries and custard. Thank you, tartlet, thank you,

Miss, for arranging it on a doily on a saucer, thank you, Nature

for these hypnotizing concentrics. My mother

(did I have one?) was likewise hypnotic. My queen,

she used and tossed me, thoughtless, from the palace.

But this isn’t a poem of woe. I’m illiterate

to that emotion. Spackled with sugar,

I’ve swum through dispassionate debris. I’m ready

to lie, freakish and freezing, in a berry.

This is my first and only spring on earth. I get it.

I’m free as an orphan who’s aged out of a baffling system.

Still, the snowfall mornings. Still, the rosy sometimes.

To be alone in this world is fatal. I accept that.

It was all a blur, anyway. No biography. A complicated coin

paid my passage. Thank you. I won’t be returning.