Louise Nevelson
Emily Gordon
Frozen, like crocuses caught
in unexpected frost: the dead bees
we gave our mother to clench
with tweezers and spray black,
lacquering their clover softness.
We knew not to touch the balsa
glued and set, achingly indentable
where they alighted—still insects
like wispy obsidian and brittle,
impotent, comforting, horrible.
Without fanfare she finished it.
in geometric sections they posed
and stuck, a dollhouse Hiroshima
where figures faced down bullets,
uncoiled springs, relentless walls.
The bees stayed silent and huge,
mummified in dark purgatory
between sting and stiffness, drunk
on pollen without crumbling
as broken things to brown earth.
Dust settled on the papery shelves
she’d built on the frame. It begged,
we thought, for our fingerprints.
But we were wrong. The dark powder
mattered, if Nevelson did. If we did.
Emily Gordon grew up in Wisconsin and California and is a longtime journalist and editor. Her poems have also appeared in The Baffler, The Women’s Review of Books, Painted Bride Quarterly, Indie Soleil, HIV Here and Now, Transition, and the Toronto Globe & Mail. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut, and is a sound improviser for the Dirty Little Secrets show in New York City.