The Lost Lunar Beekeeper

I am not like them.
I keep bees on the moon.

At night I dismantle
my favorite machines
making a guidebook.

Their eaves
unzip the trench fever,
a burial live as wool.

Seas of tranquility, of
crises,

what can a body
gain from hives
built above the sun?

Wintry lake, fecundity,
fear, a drop in every
pocked hull of rock.

Little heart, honey-pot,
sateen pin-cushion,
tiny like a footstool.

The moon in summer
witnesses your scorn,
brands you yeoman of something new.

I wish a sleepy flower
would hush me,
the speech of birds.

The moon a map of haunted houses,
carnivalesque. Cicadas in gauze click
like castanets. Stung hands and lily-feet,
I was the bravest of the savages.

I wish there were smoke.
Then I could wake the bees.

How I write you this,
how you don’t write me back.

Fool, the honey is mine.
But so is the dark.

Erin Lyndal Martin is the associate fiction editor at H_ngm_n. Her poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and music journalism have appeared widely.