Apiary Above the Traffic

At dusk the rooftops unzip their heat, tar soft as licorice under my boots, and the boxes of bees hum like small engines idling above eight lanes of impatience.

They rise in bronze spirals from clover in window boxes, threading laundry lines and satellite dishes, each wingbeat combs the city for sugar and weather, bringing home sunlight ground to amber.

Below, sirens braid with a busker's saxophone; up here, the queen writes her dark cursive across wax rooms warm as held breath, and workers read it with their bodies.

When night finally pours into the avenues, I lift one frame and smell June inside it: a meadow no map remembers, stored in hexagons against the coming cold.