My Cardboard Balcony

Little Workers by Belinda Roddie The honeycomb of headlights triggers me back to a previous suitor of mine who was filled to her boots with bees Golden hair to match little golden bodies clustered in bedazzling lumps all up and down her front, never stinging her, not once She was a pretty picture at the apiary, surrounded by waxy hives, and she tasted sweet, too, like the natural product of her adopted sons and daughters I hear the buzzing now, from both the insects and my lover's lips, but then the humming turns into a roar, and I'm back on the road receiving an angry automobile's kiss

Standing up to your knees in wet cement, you know you can flee the scene, but you're also aware of the prints you'll leave behind, prints that will dry into bits and pieces of fossilized humanity for the forensic scientists to study. Trouser hems clotted in gray as you settle on a bus that takes you to the edge of Nowhere, only Nowhere's an actual place now, with people living in it, and they all have your number.