Another Day Dead From Having Been Awake Too Long

What bees had in mind for home

resembled a magnified eye

of a fly, a globe full of holes.

What made their colony a hive of hexagons.

The gravity that whisks life askew.

Death amortized by the hours spent asleep.

An addled, collective mind cavorts

in a mobius strip. A bee’s-eye view

grasps first what it starves for—colors

before the contours of flowers.

Where the cliff folds like a kick pleat

desire remains accessory to imagination.

Night releases spores through which

some greater relief promises to arrive.

Can hornets stomach the gall to die.

Will spring relent ever.

Worker bees strip off the darkness

of bellflowers they entered like small suns.

Sometimes, sometimes, they chant.

Everything can fit into the small room

of sometimes, can it not.

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SUPHIL LEE PARK is a bilingual writer who was born and grew up in South Korea. A recent finalist for the Montreal International Poetry Prize, she graduated from New York University with a BA in English and from the University of Texas at Austin with an MFA in Poetry. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Global Poetry Anthology, Ploughshares, and the Massachusetts Review, among many others. She also writes fiction and nonfiction, some of which is to appear in J Journal, Storm Cellar, and The Iowa Review. Her debut collection of poetry, Present Tense Complex, winner of the Marystina Santiestevan Prize, is forthcoming in 2021. You can find more about her at: https://suphil-lee-park.com/