Laura Foley
Laura Foley is the author, most recently, of It’s This. Her next collection: Sledding the Valley of the Shadow(Fernwood Press) is forthcoming in 2024. Her poetry has won a Narrative Magazine Poetry Prize, The Common Good Books Poetry Prize, the Bisexual Book Award, Atlanta Review’s Grand Prize and others. Her work has been included in many journals including: Alaska Quarterly, Valparaiso, Poetry Society London, Atlanta Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, One Art, and many anthologies such as: Poetry of Presence and How to Love the World. She lives with her wife and their two romping canines on the steep banks of the Connecticut River in New Hampshire.
What We Keep
In the heat of early summer,
my bees don’t keep to their hive—
they flee, swarm a budding apple tree,
form a cluster I marvel at,
a pulsing, orange-brown,
green-fringed mass,
each body heavy with honey
they’ve scraped, like a go-bag
we’d take escaping wildfire.
As I climb the ladder, propped
on the trunk, to herd the bees,
I wonder if I keep them
to please my late husband
who dreamed of it,
or to prove something to him, or myself,
strong-willed enough to wrangle
thirty thousand humming beings
back into the space they rejected,
compliant under my direction
except for one lone scout who detects
a threat—or my hesitancy—
strikes me above the eye,
which reddens, swells shut,
keeping me humble, as does my wife,
glad to help me please myself,
or him, or all of us, by keeping bees,
as she and I keep learning
how the body balloons with pain,
then, slowly, absorbs poisons
into a greater, stronger whole.
