May 2021
Bio Note: When I was a child, I used to spend my summers at Nature Training School near Worcester,
MA and then at my grandmother's house in the middle of Fitchburg, MA, a small city but a city nonetheless. Then,
in college, I spent too much time wandering around the city and the last bits of suburban nature. Now, in quarantine
in another small city, I spend time trying to scrutinize my local park and reading funny stories from the Worcester
paper to my father. Read all about these things in my book, Poetry en Plein Air, available from Pony One Dog
Press and Amazon.
The Bees Return to Maryvale Park
On the lip of a lavender flower, a bee breathes in the wild scent born of swamp water, thick mud, and sunshine, not sugar or perfume. Another bee pries out pollen to add to its sweet hoard, the kind we may not bottle or sell: the bees’ own. Or so we want to imagine. Probably a house on MacArthur has hives, stacks of white boxes tucked among peach and apple trees, behind a tidy brick ranch. The owner settles on the stoop. He plans to sell the honey, his honey—la miel. He may sell the pollen too. Wherever they come from, whether the honey is theirs or their keeper’s, masses of bees dip into blue vervain, Joe Pye Weed, tiny yellow daisies, all the flowers that grow in the swamp with cat of nine tails and stunted, large-leafed trees. The bees were dying once. This summer they are reborn.
Originally published in In Quarantine
In Which the Stream Disappears
Last summer reeds and grass smothered the stream I used to visit in place of books or travel to peer into murky water and look for turtles while red-winged blackbirds pierced the air and landed on branches of long-dead trees. I could no longer trace the slow stream buried in green without room for water or turtles. An hour away from D.C., an hour away from dusk, the heat rose. Humidity choked me. I wished I had gone with friends to the city of movie theaters. I tried to imagine the following spring when the stream would reappear, its color then matching the shell of a turtle, the dead reeds upright on muddy islands not yet hidden by green. I could not predict that spring, the season in which friends and the city disappeared.
Originally published in The Alien Buddha Contracts COVID-19
©2021 Marianne Szlyk
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