Bees in November

I see the bees in November Huddled and intent Perfectly suited for the next swarm and discipline of survival The sweet work of keeping in my backyard as I fold recipes into pocket-sized codes: bread rising, lullabies, meetings with the future, Envelopes stamped with my name and the name of the child I might cradle, but the envelopes are porous ambitions seep through their paper skin like spilled tea stains, and the cradle remains an echoing swing at dusk where footsteps do not come to rest. A conveyor belt carries grants, marriages, breakthroughs, while I argue with my legs about whether tomorrow is negotiable. There are shelves in my mind stacked with unwritten citations, titles I rehearsed the way other girls practiced signatures, each one a doorway I memorized by touch, but the keys keep slipping into the drain of my bloodstream vanishing with that small, humiliating sound of something lost without ceremony. I’ll map my life in blue ink and wake to find the ink gone, evaporated into the mattress But sometimes possibility appears like a fruiting tree across a river I once thought shallow. I envy the bees their lives measured before they begin. No surplus nor deviation. They spend themselves cell by cell, flying straight into the math of an ending And yet, they diligently advance towards it without pause or rehearsal. If the ideal comes, it will not arrive intact. It will come limping, missing pieces reassembled from spare hours and stolen steadiness, stitched together with a discipline I never wanted to learn. And if it does not come— then this body, unruly and incandescent, will remain the most rigorous thing I have ever studied. At least, at the end of the day, I’ll be able to watch the bees cluster in November. staying, holding, and humming as the season closes in.