Apiary on the Parking Garage

At the top deck where heat shivers off tar, we set cedar boxes beside the satellite dishes. Morning arrives as sirens braided with swallows, and the hives open like small wooden lungs.

Bees lift through exhaust, gold commas in diesel air, threading between laundry balconies and crane cables. They return dusted with linden and window-box thyme, their legs carrying neighborhoods we never walk.

At noon the keeper turns a frame to the sun; honey glows, a pane cut from late August. Inside it, whole afternoons thrum in hexagons, traffic below reduced to a far metallic surf.

By dusk, the city lights itself from the ground up. The bees settle, each body a cooling ember. We seal the roof gate and taste from the spoon a sweetness that remembers every rooftop flower.