The world is your wasp’s nest. This delicate warning, this glossy thorax that pulses with threat. How you grasp what will hurt you, love what you’ve been taught to fear. You are mountainous, cannot even orient yourself with the earth’s electromagnetic field. You lumber across an open space where everything is harm. You hoard lilies while the wild violets bloom and bloom to beckon toward other lives. Miami rises over Biscayne Bay as if to conquer it, and you are wondering who gave you permission to graze your fingers over a wolf’s coarse fur, this creature some family thought they could tame into a dog, command her to sit like a good girl.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 27, Issue 2.
Alyse Bensel is the author of Spoil (SFASU Press, 2024) and Rare Wondrous Things: A Poetic Biography of Maria Sibylla Merian (Green Writers Press, 2020) as well as three chapbooks, including Lies to Tell the Body (Seven Kitchens Press, 2018). Her poems and essays have appeared in Cream City Review, Pleiades, South Dakota Review, and West Branch. Originally born and raised in south-central Pennsylvania, she now lives in the North Carolina mountains, where she is an associate professor of English at Brevard College and director of the Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference.
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