Apiary at the Overpass

At the overpass median, someone keeps bees between exits, where trucks exhale warm iron. At dusk the hives begin to hum like power lines learning a gentler current.

Commuters slow for the red light and do not see how workers lift gold dust from clover in cracks. The queen moves through darkness, a pulse of cinnamon, while sodium lamps comb amber through the frames.

By midnight, rain arrives in thin percussion. Each drop strikes tin, then cedar, then wing. The city tastes of brake smoke and linden bloom; honey thickens with weather and siren.

In the morning jars wait on a folding table, sun caught inside them like trapped afternoons. You carry one home and spread it on toast, and the highway blooms in your mouth, suddenly quiet.