Apiary Above the Freeway

Before sunrise, the rooftops sweat tin and salt. We climb fire escapes with buckets of sugar water, while the freeway below unspools its silver breath, a river of headlights learning how to fade.

Under cedar boxes, the hive hum warms our wrists. Each bee lifts like punctuation from a moving sentence, comma, dash, bright apostrophe in diesel air, stitching wild fennel to balcony basil.

In neighboring windows, coffee cups rise and pause. People watch us veil ourselves in morning gauze, as if we are tending small lanterns of weather that keep the city from hardening to stone.

By noon, honey will gather its amber grammar, sunflower, clover, a hint of brake dust and rain. At dusk we carry jars downstairs like votives, and the night tastes briefly of orchards that were not here.