Out of the killer came what is sweet.
And then all at once, a bee. Then another. Soon a murmuring
helix of heartbeats coil up
to the heavens like strings of some god’s marionette.
Below, a body.
What was once a body now a puffed carcass
given itself over to the story of sweetness.
The ancients named bees Lukoskordon which is to say
torn by wolves as it was believed bees arose
from the corpses of Greece’s dead. And so
at the essence of honey, decay.
The intoxicating aroma of mortality—
which feeds the earth, that great mother ever hungry
to cleave civilization from our chest
and cover us in saccharine wildness
until we return to bees, to the hive from which we came.
Trista Edwards is an associate editor at Luna Luna Magazine. She is also the curator and editor of the anthology, Till The Tide: An Anthology of Mermaid Poetry (Sundress Publications, 2015). You can find her work at 32 Poems, Quail Bell Magazine, Moonchild Magazine, The Adroit Journal, The Boiler, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Bad Pony, and more. She creates magickal candles at her company, Marvel + Moon. You can follow Trista on Instagram at @tristamarieedwards & @marvelandmoon