Apiary Above the Traffic

On the twelfth-floor roof, the hives wake before windows. Steam lifts from vents like pale river ghosts. A delivery truck coughs below, then fades. Honeybees map the wind between antennas.

They pass billboards peeling to their aluminum bones, skim the basil planters and satellite dishes, return dusted in gold the color of late buses, their legs carrying whole meadows in miniature.

By noon the city hardens into glare and sirens, yet the comb keeps building its soft mathematics: hexagon beside hexagon, a choir of warm engines, dark sweetness thickening in the shadowed frames.

At dusk I uncap one jar and taste July rooftops, tar, thyme, rainwater, rust, and clover memory. Night trains braid sparks along the river, and the bees sleep, small lanterns folded inward.