Swarm
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Swarm*
A honey bee queen lays the nettle and the weather in a black cloud that falls on two white men lifting a rotten tree toward their truck on the fire road. It’s just luck
come up from hiding, a nether world she sends into the August groan. The men hack and flail pale limber arms at the air, their clothing, and their ears. They jig around the truck in this unexpected season.
I stand alone across the gulley and kill the helpful girl trying to rise up in me. If they had found me alone on my afternoon walk in the forest?
Their baseball caps shucked, the red rising on their arms and faces. The bees go up and come down, a dizzy swarm. The men throw themselves in the cab of the truck,
the haze ascending on their dust, until nothing they could have done was done to me. [End Page 783]
Amber Flora Thomas is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize, Richard Peterson Poetry Prize, and Rella Lossy Award. Her first collection of poetry, Eye of Water: Poems, won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was published by University of Pittsburgh Press in 2005. Braid: Poem, her second volume, was a finalist for the 2009 May Swenson Poetry Award and has yet to find a publisher. The Rabbits Could Sing: Poems is forthcoming from the University of Alaska Press in 2012. Her poetry has also appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, Orion Magazine, Southern Poetry Review, The Comstock Review, American Literary Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. Currently, she is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, where she lives.
Footnotes
* Originally published in New Poets of the American West, edited by Lowell Jaeger (Kalispell, MT: Many Voices Press, 2010).
