The story itself need not be extraordinary, but you must express it with such honesty that it can is felt through every sense.
Sometimes it pours, but I wonder if restraint is necessary for depth to be truly shared.
Beauty is all in the limbs.
The bee keeper has gone home for the evening
he works in the yard behind mine-
well, my parents’ yard,
the green acre behind the home
where I live too and wonder daily
if it matters. The bee guy left
just as the maple leaves flipped
above on this tree, this canopy that
filters geometries of light onto
the hammock on which today I
lay. It was a tennis lesson
the summer I turned 14
where I was told, leaves turn
upside-down
before rain.
My brother hates the hammock,
says it is filthy,
I do not disagree nor
do I mind, it cradles my limbs
and from here I see
both the bee keeper and
my aging grandmother smoking
her cigarette gracefully like
the lady in a nightgown she is.
Suspended here I wonder, how
real can I be? Much less
than my grandmother once was,
holding smoke in one hand,
the other flipping an omelet,
breakfast of most mornings. Or
Nameless neighbor keeping bees-
sometimes I see him
smoking-out the bees to sedate
them and I wonder just how anxious
they could be, yards from
my parent’s home and could
proximity transcend species? Anyway
from this hammock I
read, romanticize life
and wonder why at twenty-two I
spend the humid afternoon
in the yard, a witness just
to leaves tossed on
their fragile backs.
Kate Devine 