Rooftop Apiary After Rain

At dusk the rooftops lift their wet tin shoulders. Buckets of stormwater hold the sky in fragments. Between satellite dishes, hives breathe warm cedar, and the first bee tests the air like a violin note.

She lands on basil leaves slick as green glass, drinks from a blossom bruised by thunder. Traffic below keeps its iron heartbeat, but here every wingbeat edits the evening.

I open the smoker; lavender ash climbs slowly. The colony answers in one low golden chord. Rain begins again, fine as thread through needles, sewing light to each moving back.

By night the city windows bloom and close, a thousand temporary moons in brick. Inside the hive, honey thickens in the dark, summer translated into a language of hexagons.