You sit at a table in the dark
as your first cup of
morning coffee brews,
reading on your phone
about the various ways
various bees survive winter.
Those that don’t hibernate
or migrate, like carpenter bees,
devote themselves to their future eggs.
Male honey bees
are removed from the hive
until they’re needed again come spring.
Envelopes of wildflower seeds
you bought online
wait there in the kitchen junk drawer
of your new house,
wait for the ground to thaw.
Brian Beatty is the author of five small press poetry collections and a spoken-word album. Beatty’s writing has appeared in Appalachian Journal, BULL, Conduit, Cowboy Jamboree, CutBank, Evergreen Review, Exquisite Corpse, Floyd County Moonshine, McSweeney’s, The Missouri Review, ONE ART, The Quarterly, Rattle, Seventeen and The Southern Review.
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