CAROLYN WILSEY

Bee Acupuncture

I thought you were joking. Or one of the birthmarks on my neck had come loose. But it was a real bee. Wandering across my throat. We whisked it to the windowsill, then to the ground, where it lay sundrunk. Unfurling its tiny iron wings -- grates protecting the emberfire of its body. As we watched, you told me about an old girlfriend, a healer who used to experiment on you. She dotted your meridien lines with live bees. Then she encouraged them to sting you. I hated to think how. You were going to see her soon in Detroit. I imagined you on a white sheet -- naked except for the punctuation of bees. They formed a crucifix on your chest like an overblown tattoo. And her. Upending your familiar patch of midchest hair. With her fingernails. Planting more bees in your skin. In nonimaginary life, I turned toward your perfectperfect face. Your eyes. Your irises were still blue with microscopic brown pointillism: now I worried these were the tiniest bees.

Carolyn Wilsey has a BA in American Literature from Middlebury College and an MFA in Creative Writing, Fiction, from Emerson College. She attended the Iowa Summer Writing Festival and Napa Valley Writers’ Conference as a poet and is active in Bay Area workshops. Carolyn loves living within walking distance of the continent’s edge. While her journalistic writing has been published in tiny presses as well as large national magazines, she is enthusiastically rediscovering writing poems. Recently published in Pretty Owl Poetry, her work is forthcoming in The Virginia Normal.