A Friend Gifts Me a Paper Bag of Honeycomb

I hold the vacant cradles in my palm:

wax wan-white, honey-drained, ringed

with dirt and gray. I arrange the shells

atop the coffee table’s grain: an atlas

of foreclosure left to empty on the branch.

I think about catastrophe more than poetry.

The colony that fled my neighbor’s keep

leaving behind the flightless brood

and then expiring in the field. The shoddy room

in Lincoln where my mother died, strung out,

with a bullet in her head. No one wants

a place like that but me: yellow-stained

with nicotine, waxy blinds pulled down

against the cracking glass. In the archive

of images on Google Maps I watch

its slow decay. Walls left to bend

and bleach, the front lot overgrown

with weeds where now the feral bees

must love to swarm, rattling the tickseed,

buzzing in the bluestem grass, building

sticky hives behind the rotting boards.