Super Blood Wolf Moon, Leigh Camacho Rourks

They’re out there screaming “super blood wolf moon”—

no really, every headline—and all I care about

is that I’ve become convinced

that my heart is actually just a comb of bees.

Not so much the honey, but that waxy,

buzzing bit, barely yellow, pale

and curling inward, the heat of breath

in my lungs melting it.

This is not a metaphor for how much I miss you

in bed, the way the smell of my sweat has turned sour

my spit sour/everything sour

How could it be?

This honeycomb thing that can’t even beat out

a rhythm right, that can’t do anything but drip

and rumble, a thousand forewings/hindwings moving

it instead of that beat that everyone else

gets handed at birth.

Everyone is locked on to some mundane

moonrise, giving it magic, and I’m over here,

a medical marvel—this insect infestation and still

I’m walking upright.

I haven’t slept much, the buzzing

being what it is, the way it echoes in the empty.

And my veins. Completely overrun.

Fat honey, the color of sap and sand, these bees

without nectar producing something less sweet,

but still thick enough, for sure. I can feel the way

it crawls to gravity, and I wonder if this moon

will call it, will howl in proximity, if this is the way

I will go, pale honey leaking and leaving me.

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Leigh Camacho Rourks is a Cuban-American author from South Louisiana and Assistant Professor at Beacon College in Florida. Her collection, Moon Trees and Other Orphans, won the St. Lawrence Book Award. She is also the recipient of the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award and the Robert Watson Literary Review Prize.