Poetry: The Weight of bees

Published in Dreich Shorts, Autumn 2020

 

The Weight of Bees

 

Bear is up on her back legs. She has woken strong. She’s still furious but she’s upright now, and very. Her femurs are long, like a horse’s. Her lover once admired her thighs, told her they were firm and full just like the thoroughbreds they’d both ridden in other lives. Bear is glad to be up on her back legs again. Recently she’s been felled over and over by her own need (the most unbearlike need) for reassurances. A bear with bloodied knees and broken leaves on her nose is not a pretty sight. She is up now and reaches past hawthorn spines to pink-dusted stigmas. She sees in this thin light that her rage is all for herself, who else when it was she who forgot to piss boundaries on the trees. Luckily she has magic in her paws, with a smudge of pollen can turn lovers into others. Hawthorn claws rend her fur as she stretches through. The blossom is barely beginning yet smells of things finishing. Bear sits down under the sudden weight of bees.