You find yourself in dusk. The day culminates in the burrowing colors. The horizon glows behind the mountains. Eyes close now, aspen leaves in your hair. You press eyelids tighter; red in the black—brief. The smell of moist earth in your lungs, you think of the redshifts—their tails and tales: whispers in the gaps of space. Yes, you think of gaps. You think of a bat’s bipedal membranes and consciousness in kangaroos. You think of Bohr discovering. You think of awards and rewards.
You think of Bohr regretting. You think of the tortoise’s carapace. A home: mise-en scène you carry with you; the body as a place to gather. You think of all things dorsal and dorsum of the tongue. You think. In the deep of your pupils, back to the medulla oblongata, you know the light has left you. You think of Homo habilis. You think of her, walking away. You think of her thinking about walking away. Awareness binds—Ponge taught you this. The cool invades your bones before your skin. You know: the crickets are coming.
Song of legs and wings; you wonder what your ribs sound like. You know that you hum, even when no stethoscope touches your sternum. You hum like an insect from the inside out. Like song, you cannot linger. All things subject to living are transitory. The red shift someday burns blue. The joey outgrows her pocket. Bohr thought an atom and the desert blew up. The tortoise rots in a fossilized shell. Earth lactated an ocean and a generation of Homo sapiens wiggled out of scales. The female cricket houses no song in her legs, and you are sisters humming from the inside. You cannot stay in dusk. Why then, are you unable to open your eyes?
The newspaper speaks of the worry of invasive species in Steamboat Springs. Invasive species. You read this in the back of your throat; you read this in the back of your yard. As you read, a honey bee murmurs in your ear; another bee tests your knee for pollen; another bee sits on your paper—a participatory gesture. You find a nest in the belly of your chimenea. You’re on all fours, face framed in rounded edges of the clay opening, eyes spellbound by the bustle of the hexagonal combs. The teeming ignores you, despite your cheeks and brows sullying the sun. One on another, on another, the stacked bodies: bees pay no attention to space—the colony shares surface like an ocean shares the wet.
You think of your trip to Italy. You and your sister walking from the ancient side of Rome, across the bridge lined with vendors, beggars, and the woman with no left foot, holding her baby in one hand and the “Ci salva” sign in the other, to the Vatican side. How the woman leaned over her midsection where she sat and reached out to touch your leg. You wanted to stop but didn’t. You feared what her palm would show you. The heat smeared the cobbles and your vision as you walked up to the domed complex. The colors of midday melted into buildings, melted into you. The woman’s hand always grasping, just missing your calf, dissolving into the bridge. You remember the white on everything, distending, as you approached the obelisked plaza; the crosses immense and visible, unlike from the airplane window. All swelling in white. You remember the columns stretching. You remember north, and the spiral ramp offering you to the array of corridors and papal relics. You both went to see the Sistine Chapel. In the first subdivision of the Vatican museum, the segmented statues are from Egypt and ancient Rome. Figures confiscated by the church, housed in the church’s museum. You turned to your sister, “Did you know these were here?” She shook her head, burying her vision into the map, into the next room. Chamber after chamber, the relics of a fallen empire, stolen and displayed by the church. Both of you mute, eyes full. A ceiling of gold, a passageway between more important showcases, created a false sun, for those who could afford the twenty-one Euros payment to see such collections. By the time you reached the Sistine Chapel, you wondered what the Etruscan sun could do to piles of gold. You wonder how, with the golden ball inside the cracked golden ball, the paintings, the jewelry, The Laocoon, the globes, the clocks, the desks, the bust of Pythagoras, the maps, the Raphael Room, the statues, the urns, and the stone carvings, you felt so hollow. You drummed your chest to reassure—you were not a canyon dressed with flesh. You wished you had let the old woman touch you.
Back in the opening of the chimenea; small legs by your eyelashes; you back away. You sit, legs crossed on the grass. You think of your tiny plot of land, the soil you bought to force the garden’s growth, the aspen roots popping up through the lawn defiantly, the fence blocking out the driveway behind it, and your face inside the chimenea, spying. You think of invasion and species and all that gold in long bright corridors. The gold and the church as the wet and the ocean. You think of her hands and the hand-written sign: Save us.
Back home eating pizza on the couch, you hear a bee fluttering in the lampshade. A discussion commences about transporting the bee out of the living room. In debate, the bee crawls onto your partner’s shoulder. Startled, he slaps and slaps. The bee, being bee, dips back-end into his arm. You note the expression on his face; you note the expression of the bee—which appears similar in rigor mortis as in motion.
A honey bee knows the outcome of haste and yet, she is here, in the light. She lives fully, either always in fear of, or without fear of, death attached to her actions. Her most precious cargo: her stinger; the reason for her tizzy; her greatest weapon and her greatest flaw. Do not protect yourself and die, or protect yourself and die? The choices of such power. She hovers all day in sweet things: both giving and taking. Sweetness, she mistook as the incandescent heat from under the shade. She wandered too greedily or perhaps too bravely. You think mutely of Ponge. You think of the bee’s precious cargo. “Her awareness of its value.”
A swollen hole and stinger-less corpse later, you think about how ordinary the stars and suns would be without the vast darkness of space to burn against; empty chrysalis shells crunching under foot; the stock market and other imaginary worlds; suicide bombers; one Egyptian’s set of hands holding a rope with hundreds of other Egyptian hands, pulling a two-ton block of stone up a base of sand; what it takes to form. A hole created—gains and losses—what absence illuminates.
Felicia Zamora is the author of six books of poetry including, Quotient (Tinderbox Editions, 2022), I Always Carry My Bones, winner of the 2020 Iowa Poetry Prize (University of Iowa Press, 2021) and the 2022 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry, Body of Render, Benjamin Saltman Award winner (Red Hen Press, 2020), and Of Form & Gather, Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize winner (University of Notre Dame Press). She’s received fellowships and residencies from CantoMundo, Ragdale Foundation, and Tin House. She won the 2022 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize from The Georgia Review, the 2020 C.P. Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, the Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and a 2022 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, The American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry 2022, Boston Review, Georgia Review, Guernica, The Missouri Review, Orion, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, West Branch, and others. She is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and associate poetry editor for the Colorado Review.
Photo by Lukas.