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Searching for the Queen Bee
Outlast, outgrow, outshine
all midnight, all opposition.
For sweat & fists don’t silence
you, but the gridded landscape
does. Go ahead, run to the garden
where childhood sinks inside
the lake’s lips. Wash your face,
its dark adult spot. Believe
in the dawn behind the giant
tree, the light’s torn dress,
redress. If you’re tired
of fighting, how do you find
the Queen? She’s all appetite
and aplomb in runny regalia,
so moist you latch on. Life
is not dear unless coveted
things are claimed: the joy
of exploding queens crackling
in jaws, tougher than goat
and sweet thorns. Honey sticks
to horse manes, rat hide, pigeons
electrocuted on fences,
damp newspapers, headlines
explaining cruelty, cruelty.
Honey drips from glaciers.
May you never sleep, badger:
ever-droning, ever-hunting.
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Hurling a Durian
This is the fantasy fruit: it can awaken
desires lodged deep inside a person
but stuck, like an almond clogging
the windpipe. The smell of a durian
may erase a child’s immediate memories.
So I am addicted, of course. Not to eating
but to sniffing it like glue, my fingers probing
its dry, spiked surface until they bleed
and I eat. But the feast disappoints
me because its taste replaces the corpse
scent with something sweet and eggy,
a benign tang I flush down with wasabi.
For there is nothing a kid like me
can do except awaken to loss and wish
for a seven-piece suit of armor. The desire
always returns: durian as a weapon of truth.
Even if I don’t know how to pull a trigger
or whet a knife, it’s tempting to imagine
throwing a dangerous fruit at the head
of the person who failed you, who hurt you,
who, for all these years, has tried to break
you. But this desire is lodged deep
for a reason: the pull of forgiveness
like a hopeless gravity, and always, I try
to resist. So I do by taking a spoonful
to my lips, savoring the smear, the din
of my cleaver hacking the husk, the juice,
the sweat ripping open the rind.
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Monstera Deliciosa
I’m a monster because I poison the children.
They dance around me and my fronds flutter
with holes. They invite: Eat my fanged fruit.
Each scale will peel off easy, but if you eat it
unripe, it will steal your voice. Your gums
will blister little stars. You’ll vomit, swell, tremble.
When ripe, it is sublime. Better than banana,
soft mango, sweeter than wild yellow rambutan
coated in syrup. It only takes one year. Bite.
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The Azalea Eaters
Mother begs us not to eat the flowers.
We scrape the pots for blubber. Fat
scalds our dreams, broils our sweat.
Softly, azaleas kill our hunger.
Because we believe in pink spadix,
the fragrance pollinates our tongues.
Before the farmers bulldoze them,
we smuggle fistfuls into our knapsacks.
Now we are sick but only as sick
as the river that fed us golden tadpoles.
The river is a gutted diorama: the dire
wolf, awakening, spits out teeth & fur.
In our retching, we summon the aphids.
We enter the malnutritive night.
Stag beetles & horntails
swarm the wax leaves, calm
the poisons in our too-hot
cotton mouths.
In our fevers, we summon summer.
Weevils swim the length of lake. Toads
tease us with their fat slime.
No water makes us believe we have gills.
Frogs hatch from fuzz. We pity their birth.
It’s the eleventh season of hunger. Ding dong,
belts the frog in the muck. Ding dong,
sings the salamander.
Fetal and feral, we curl
in our beds.
Fetal and feral, we drink
in the dusk,
hands da...
