Rooftop Apiary in Late April

The city wakes in steel-blue breaths, and on the grocery roof, white boxes hum like small harmoniums warming their reeds. A gull drifts past, surprised by honey.

Bees lift from the hive in amber punctuation, commaing the air between satellite dishes, threading pollen from balcony basil, from dandelions splitting the sidewalk seams.

Below, buses kneel and exhale at the curb; above, each wingbeat writes a thinner weather, a soft insistence that sweetness can be made from exhaust light and window glare.

By noon the comb has thickened with sunlight. A keeper in a veil uncaps one frame, and the whole roof smells of warm brass and clover, as if summer had opened early in the mouth.