Rooftop Apiary at Midnight

On the grocery roof, the hives breathe like accordions. Midnight traffic combs the avenues below. I lift a lid and warm thunder rises, a thousand amber vowels tasting sodium light.

The moon hangs in the skylight of each wing. They return dusted with neon from billboards, from window boxes balanced above laundromats, from clover stubborn in cracks of loading docks.

I learn this city by what they carry home: linden after rain, fennel by the rail yard, a sudden thread of jasmine near the hospital, and smoke, always smoke, stitched thin in the honey.

At dawn I bottle the dark into glass. Sun slides along the jars like a bow on strings. People stir sweetness into their ordinary coffee, never hearing the rooftop cathedral still humming.