see: tender, suspended at the tip

of arm hairs that never darkened

     never hearkened or grew

the tangle of my father’s muscle

the way he mangled through skin

     under thin bindings, not yet bone:

a bicycle wheel, unsteady ecliptic

starsign, phenotypically confined

     stars divined in blue, in old

time guidebooks, colorless water-fed

slender spine and narrow hipped, I

     was rendered, engendered, yet:

vulture bees sensitive, uncertain

plumose tender my roadside carrion

     ferry onward, yellow coinweight

bees pinned in lashes, my delicate hairs

catalyzed the old old instinct to feed

     thin-winged distinctions of queens:

conferred in me to me, bee-fed

on royal jelly, on rest stop tables

     carved through ribs, punched holes

I swallowed, vulture bees enveloped

my stomach, my outline, incorporeal

     incorporated—my hive hummed:

belly alive with foot tips, with comb

engorged I breathed bee vultures

     breathed cultures in mediums

ghostwise honeycomb in waxed

arteries, jelly slicked and sucked

     jelly licked and fucked I become:

wings split my skin up my middle

seams my father mapped, outlines

     of scenes, what seemed to be, the me

from which he wouldn’t permit to deviate

the bauplan, the grand boyplan of his genes

     deviously unmarked, unmarred, unsnarled:

all categories of caution and confinement

of contempt, contemporary mores against

     all my stores of queenly drops, my coins

golden stops along the fairywise bees

path of roadside meadow, roadkill sweet

     honeyed meat of what I couldn’t have been

Copyright © 2026 by Rick Hollon