The Rooftop Apiary

The city wakes in layers, a slow unzipping— steam from alley vents, the clack of shutters, and above it all, hives like warm briefcases where morning folds its light into paper wings.

I climb past antennae and laundry lines, past the hush of tar and puddled sky, to the hum that is more weather than sound, a small thunder housed in cedar boxes.

They rise and fall like breath in a sleeping animal, threading the air with a bright, elastic route, finding thyme in window boxes, dust on paint, mapping sweetness across a grid of streets.

When the sun finally clears the eastern scaffold, it finds us—keepers and kept— with our hands open, cupping a living heat that stains the morning gold.