Rooftop Apiary at Dusk

At the top of the grocery, hives warm like small engines. Evening pours copper along the HVAC fins. Bees lift and settle, commas in a sentence of heat, carrying the day’s clover through tar and billboard light.

Below, buses kneel and breathe at the curb. A child drops an orange peel; its perfume rises six floors. Workers rinse mops in back alleys bright with detergent moons. From this height, the city is a throat learning to sing.

Inside each box, the dark is not empty but tuned: wax rooms humming with maps of impossible fields, dances that measure distance in sun angles and pulse, gold thickening slowly out of ordinary weather.

Night comes on with sirens, then rain. The bees fold themselves into one breathing lantern. I stand between antennas and wet basil pots, hearing tomorrow being made from what we almost missed.