Tonight's Poet Corner: This Is

This Is
by Belinda Roddie

This is a handful
of honey from the womb
of a mother who I never knew
how to love or why I should.
This is

a doorstop built
from the wood I collected
from streams when my feet
got too hot and my head
got too crammed with words.
This is

a paper airplane,
and this is its pilot.
This is his paper house
and his little
bleached paper wife.
This is a chalk drawing

of a bee hive that buzzes
with birds instead of bees.
A mother never taught me
how to love or why I should.
This is a man

trying desperately to be
more than sugar stuck
to a paper lullaby. He is
hungry. He is hot.
He is like me in that

the words ate him alive
and stripped him as white
as purged honeycomb.