APOIDEA
“Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In a cowslip’s bell I lie.”
– William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Honeybee, hornet, yellow jacket, wasp.
Cleopatra holds asp to breast: hive loss.
Queen bee. Queen cell. The Queen is in her cups.
Brother, Caesar, Antony: worthless fucks.
Though woman, lover, other, boss, the hive
Without its matriarch, like Empire, dies.
SUPERMOON
The night abides making the windowpane
a mirror mirroring my pale face, black hair,
brown eyes. Time normalizes everything,
even these months and months of nothing,
the colossal space between moons and stars.
We should be able to bear it, this moon
burning outside the window, yellower,
leaning closer than ever before,
circling us circling the unseen sun. And in
the lightless world within, a miniature moon
floats in my womb’s slippery night,
heart beating time, time beating heart.
THE THIN VEIL
belly up
but not in
death the knife’s
edge between
you and she
and labor’s
end lies at
the thin veil
you push through
on your back
when she comes
Wendy Chin-Tanner is the author of the poetry collection Turn (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014) and co-author of the graphic novel American Terrorist (A Wave Blue World). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming at Vinyl Poetry, The Rumpus, The Huffington Post, RHINO Poetry, Denver Quarterly, The Mays Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge, and elsewhere. She is a founding editor at Kin Poetry Journal, poetry editor at The Nervous Breakdown, staff interviewer at Lantern Review, and co-founder at A Wave Blue World.