Lore Graham
A single bee lands,
nesting in your hair.
You grab for it, claw
your own hair out;
you tear yourself bald
but you can’t catch it.
It nips at your skull,
nibbling away skin,
burrowing into bone,
carving a hidey-hole to lay
its shivering clutch of eggs
in your gray matter.
Soon, a thousand crawling,
feisty larvae are feasting
on cerebrum, growing
fat on brain.
There’s sweet, soothing
numbness once they’re
nesting in your mind,
eating away until you’re
nothing, hollowed out into a hive.
Bees crawl out of holes
in the brain-comb,
fattened and dripping
with digested thoughts.
Each bee flies away.
A single bee lands.
***
Lore Graham is a queer author of speculative poetry and fiction who lives in Massachusetts. Their poetry has been published in Strange Horizons, Liminality, and Mythic Delirium, among other venues.