Rooftop Apiary at Dusk

Elevators cough me onto the tar-black roof, where vents exhale the day’s last factory heat. Between satellite dishes, wooden hives glow like small lit chapels for a thousand wings.

The bees return carrying pollen the color of rust and apricot, maple dust, linden breath, stray balcony basil. They spiral down in amber syllables, and the city loosens one button at the throat.

Below, sirens stitch red thread through avenues, a train drags its iron river west. Up here, combs fill slowly with translated weather, sunlight rewritten as weight, as sweetness, as time.

I lift a frame; it hums against my palms, a warm, living instrument tuned to August. Night climbs the glass towers, floor by floor, and honey keeps one last piece of afternoon.