Apiary Above the Freeway

On the grocery roof, evening unbuttons its copper coat. Hives hum beside satellite dishes and heat vents, and the city below keeps changing lanes like quicksilver, while one bee circles my wrist, reading salt as weather.

Their flight writes cursive between laundry lines and cranes; pollen dust glows on their legs like borrowed sunrise. A siren blooms, then thins into traffic, and still they return, precise as metronomes of gold.

I lift a frame: hexagons lit from within, tiny rooms of amber rain and crushed clover. Smoke drifts upward, a soft gray psalm, over brick, over billboards, over the river's tin mouth.

Night arrives carrying neon and basil and rain. Inside the hive, summer is being translated to sweetness. On every balcony, plants lean toward this invisible choir, and the dark itself tastes faintly of flowers.