Natalie Tombasco

Bees!

“Honey-drudgers. / I am no drudge.” -Sylvia Plath

Bees yellow as Twinkies swan-dive into wisteria.
Colony Collapse is her primal scream: orange
Blossom, alfalfa—gone spindly in pesticides,
Monoculture disease. Where is the royal jelly,
The lavender fizz, that good good Tupelo honey

From a backwoods swamp and sold on I-65
With a biscuit? Where is the bee hum?
Little socialist kazoos. Blame the husbandry,
The un-wilding, conquering. It is not pleasing
To Caesar that the wind does not curtsy,

That I control meltwater. Blame Monsanto’s
Patented seeds. Supermarket piles of plump
Pomelo, green lawns cut into square feet.
Listen to spring’s oracle: daffodil’s lulling
Of slugs. A contagious hush. It is a ruthless

Silence, brutal, but lovely as birth control.
Outside it is a blue April. Inside there is Silent
Spring and Slow Violence. Will the hive survive
On Tate and Lyle? Is childbearing best when
Scientists forecast a decade left? I squeeze the life out

Of a plastic bear. I’m in a swarmy mood. Not even
The beekeeper’s smoke can shut me up. Is a woman
Just an egg-laying machine confined to her den,
Surrounded by radiant jars of viscous manuka
As the Hollywood sign is carried away in a mud flow?

Brown sugar, molasses, hibiscus. The swarm is going
Berserk in their smallness, their superorganism.
Industrious virgins of rosehip hocus-pocus, warning
To wake the fuck up & smell the mint leaves, clementines,
The wintering—hurry! before the soil settles into elegy.

Natalie Louise Tombasco was selected for the Best New Poets anthology by Kaveh Akbar in 2021, Copper Nickel‘s Editor’s Prize. She was also a published finalist for Cutbank Books chapbook contest with her manuscript titled Collective Inventions (2021). She is a PhD candidate at Florida State University and serves as one of the Poetry Editors of the Southeast Review. Her work can be found in Gulf Coast, Black Warrior Review, Plume, Cincinnati Review, Diode Poetry Journal, Fairy Tale Review, Peach Mag, among others. Find out more at www.natalielouisetombasco.com.