notdeermag
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.
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.